Roasting by feel in Veracruz: what ripe coffee cherries leave behind

Don Federico never once looked at a screen. He pulled a steel scoop of beans from the drum, held it under his nose, glanced at the colour and let the roast run on. In Veracruz we learned how this grandmaster works his roaster, and it changed how I think about Veracruz coffee, from the cherry on the branch to the cup.

Back home we are used to coffee being roasted with data. Here everything ran on feel and smell.

Roasting on feel and smell instead of data

The roastery was a small room with a terrazzo floor, a hopper above the drum and a cooling tray that turned slowly next to it. A poster on the wall showed the tipos de tueste, light, medium and dark, with a little drawing of beans for each. When Don Federico roasts for his socios, they come to him and stand around the machine. Every so often, in the middle of the roast, he shows them the colour and lets them smell. He keeps doing that until everything feels right to him.

That was the lesson in one picture. Nobody called out a temperature. The decision about the taste sat in his hands and his nose, built up over years of roasting. You could see how experience decides the flavour.

From green to yellow to brown: the colour he watched

He was reading something every roaster reads, with or without software. Raw coffee goes into the drum green and full of water. The first stretch of a roast is the drying phase: the beans lose moisture and barely change in taste. At the end of drying comes yellowing, when the beans turn a pale straw colour and smell a bit like hay or fresh bread.

From yellowing until the first pop, roasters speak of the Maillard phase. Sugars and amino acids react, the beans go from tan to brown, and much of what you later taste as sweetness and body is formed here. Each scoop he pulled was a snapshot of that curve. A slightly lighter or darker brown, a sharper or rounder smell, told him where the batch stood.

The pop at first crack, and what the data shows

First crack comes next. Moisture inside the bean turns to steam, the pressure builds, and the beans split open with an audible pop, usually somewhere around 196 to 205 °C bean temperature, depending on the machine and the coffee. From that moment the development time starts. Colour and flavour now change fast, and a minute too long can flatten a coffee that grew slowly in the shade, the way most of it does on these slopes, as we wrote about in why the trees stand above the coffee.

Where our coffee is roasted back home, the same moments are followed on a graph. The software logs bean temperature every few seconds and draws the rate of rise, how quickly that temperature climbs, against a planned roast profile. It is a precise tool. Watching Don Federico, I realised he was tracking the same curve without the line on a screen: the colour told him the phase, the smell told him the speed.

Ripe versus green: what the eye catches

A good roaster's eye starts long before the drum. On the farm, a picker sees at a glance what most of us would miss: ripe coffee cherries are bright red, glossy and firm, and the ones still green stay on the branch for a later pass. That is selective coffee picking, and the difference with strip picking is that green coffee cherries are left to ripen instead of being pulled off with the rest. On the steep slopes around Xico and in the Coatepec coffee country, the coffee harvest is done by hand for exactly this reason, and it stretches over a few rounds, as in one picking window.

When an unripe cherry slips through anyway, the roast gives it away. Its bean lacks the sugars to brown properly and comes out of the drum pale and dull. Roasters call it a quaker, and it tastes of raw peanut or paper. You cannot reliably see quakers in green coffee, only after roasting, which is why the roasted beans were sorted by hand in a bowl afterwards. The picker's eye on the branch and the roaster's eye in the cooling tray look for the same thing.

What Mexican coffee taught me about our own roast

I came to Mexico thinking of roasting as a technical job: set the profile, follow the curve. Don Federico showed me the other half. Data tells you what happened. Smell and colour tell you what is happening right now, and only years of roasts teach you what to do with that.

It was a really interesting moment to learn from, because it made our own taste better too, in how our coffee is roasted at home. Now we look at a roast differently: what the colour says and what the smell says, before the number. A visit to someone else's roaster is no training course, but it was enough to change how we listen to Mexican coffee.

Next time you open a bag, pour a handful of beans on a white plate. Look for the odd pale one among the brown, then smell them before you grind. That pale bean started as a green cherry, and now you know what to look for.