Facing the Coffeepocalypse

 

On the day of the solstice and of the predicted-by- alarmists apocalypse day, I ran out of coffee beans. Not good.  Earlier this week I discovered that our town has a local coffee roaster. Good, very good.  In fact, he lives one street over from us. Just plain amazing! Donny Loewen of Silent Creek Coffee invited me by  while he roasted the coffee I bought and he treated me to a tour, a great cup of coffee and a wonderful conversation about all things coffee. Awesome! Lots of pictures to share from my big coffee adventure....

Mr. Loewen graciously allowed me to snap some pictures as he roasted my order of Yirgacheffe (from Ethiopia)

Roast-meister Donny Loewen scooped, weighed and poured my Yirgacheffe beans into his  roaster.We went with light roast.

The beans are whitish or green to begin with. The roasting to "first crack" at about 420 degrees  will give us a light roast. Mr. Loewen is far more precise with time and temperature than I've reported here.

From roasting chamber to cooling pan

The beans are air cooled to maintain the quality of roast...they'll keep roasting even after  coming out of the roasting chamber!

Guests get to write on Mr. Loewen's wall!

This bag of Yirgacheffe light roast was roasted and bagged right there while I waited  It will need to "set" for about 48 hours so it won't taste too 'roasty'

Miss Jasmine and Mr. Jimmy stopped by with their brother Alisher(whose name means strong lion) and their  dad Mike who needed some coffee too. Today is Jimmy's birthday....solstice and "apocalypse" and all. These three know their way around the shop and even helped with packaging and labeling coffee. The photograph was taken and posted with their and their dad's permission. 

   Brewed a cup of some medium roast from Kenya that Donny roasted a couple of days ago. What a satisfying mug of java that was! This made my face very, very happy.