I think that roasting coffee really well, must be one of the hardest things on earth to do properly. You tell yourself that as long as it’s brown it should taste good, knowing full well that in reality there are about a billion outcomes of this one roast and that in all liklihood, you’ll miss the mark.

The above paragraph should give some indication as to my success in roasting of the Ugandan primary school coffee.

No… it didn’t go very well.

For starters the beans were a little bit too wet I reckon. I was able to bite through them without too much trouble, which indicates to me that they could have done with a bit longer drying.

Secondly, they smelt strangely like blue cheese, which indicated that there could be a stinker bean in the pack, or that there was still some fermentation going on… So I sorted through them, removing a few dodgy looking culprets and moved on to the roast.

I pretty much guessed the roast temperature at 230deg and set them going for 18 minutes, thinking that it would be long enough for a light roast (for french press) despite the moisture content.

After 18 minutes however they still looked a bit pale, but it was hard to tell because I hadn’t loostened enough of the parchment off before hand. So I whacked (literally that graceless) another 4 minutes on the timer and yes, you guessed it, overcooked them.

You can probably see from the picture above that the roast isn’t particularly consistent either. It was once I put it through the brewing grinder and a little of what was in there before came throughI believe it was Square Mile Santa Rita Natural, and very delicious it was too., in a stark contrast of colour that I realised it was a little bit dark.

In the cup: intial buttery caramel leading on to a dark burnt flavours, a touch of earthiness and some spice. Very low acidity, even with a lighter roast this would be pretty mild, so the initial expectations of something vaguely Indonesian in style were correct.

Lesson learnt, but it was still fun to play with such a unique coffee with a great story to go with it. Next time I get hold of something cool, I think i’ll pass it on to the professionals!

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