I’ve got to say…I feel pretty lucky.  While I am embarking on quite the crazy adventure…I definitely feel the support. Both Andrew and Jamie have been so positive about this whole crazy project. And what’s more, Jamie has actually agreed to coach me through it all. What a group of rockstars!

Today with day one of roasting championship training with Jamie. I rocked up to Deptford Bridge thinking …well actually I don’t know what I was thinking. I suppose that I was going to have some sort of classically structured ‘how to roast’ lecture. But why in the world did I even allow that thought to cross my mind? Have you met the guy? This is Jamie we are talking about. The main as a mean handlebar moustache and knows more about random things than I can shake a stick it. He’s the guy with all the crazy ideas…that just might actually work J. So of course, with that comes a less structured, but equally more effective way to learn how to roast.

Essentially…he told me… to take the coffee that is sitting next to the sample roaster…and turn it brown. ‘just go burn some stuff…and it’ll will all start to make sense’.  And as much as I wanted to continue asking questions and creating theoretical predictions, he assured me that I needed to go ‘play’ in order to get my head around anything in the first place. He wanted me to just focus on roasting the coffee and smelling the stages. He wanted me to trust the sensory and experience the stages of roasting…old school. No cropster, no fancy machine, no reliance on technology. Observe, record, and correlate.

So that’s what I did. I focussed on turning it brown and noticing the visual and orthonasal signals of change that the coffee was experiencing. I recorded data. I smelled some beans. I turned some green stuff brown.