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Method of Roasting Coffee
Procure a small coffee-roaster and have in readiness a pound of Java, thoroughly mixed with a pound of Mocha, put it into the roaster, remove one of the lids from the stove, and place the roaster over a moderate fire, then turn the handle constantly but slowly until the coffee acquires a good brown color, say about twenty-five minutes or so: when done transfer it to an earthenware jar, cover tightly, and it is ready for use when required.
A home coffee-roasting method from the era when green beans were the ordinary purchase and roasting was a weekly kitchen chore. The technique still works, but two things in the instructions are now known to be wrong.
- Do not use it immediatelyFreshly roasted coffee releases carbon dioxide for a day or more, and brewing it straight from the roaster gives a sour, gassy cup. Rest the beans loosely covered for 12 to 24 hours before grinding. This is the one correction that matters most.
- Not airtight, not at firstAn earthenware jar "covered tightly" traps the escaping gas. Leave the beans vented for the first day, then store them airtight, whole, away from light, and use within two weeks.
- "A moderate fire"On a wood or coal range, a steady moderate heat under the roaster body. For reference, in modern drum roasting first crack arrives at a bean temperature of roughly 385-400F, often somewhere in the first ten to twelve minutes, though timing on a hand-cranked stove-lid roaster cannot be assumed from that. Twenty-five minutes total is at the long end; much beyond that and the cup flattens out.
- Judge by sound, not only color"A good brown color" is unreliable in dim light and varies by bean. Listen for first crack, a distinct snapping like popcorn, then a quieter crackle at second crack. City roast is just after first crack, Full City just before or at the onset of second crack, Vienna darker still. Something in the City to Full City range is the likeliest reading of "a good brown color", though the text does not say.
- Java and MochaMocha means Yemeni or Ethiopian coffee shipped through the Yemeni port; Java means Indonesian. Both names now describe styles as much as origins, and "mocha" on a modern menu means chocolate. For the intended effect buy an Ethiopian natural and a Sumatran or Javanese wet-hulled, one pound each, blended after roasting rather than before, since they take heat at different rates.
- The chaff and the smokeRoasting sheds papery silverskin and produces genuine smoke from first crack onward. Do it under a running range hood or outdoors on a side burner. A stovetop popcorn popper with a hand crank is the closest modern equivalent to the roaster described.
- Weight lossTwo pounds of green beans yield roughly 1 lb 10 oz roasted, as moisture cooks off. Buy green by weight accordingly.
- CoolingThe original omits it. Get the beans out of the hot drum at once and spread them on a sheet pan or shake them in a colander; residual heat in a covered vessel will keep roasting them past where you stopped.
Mocha-Java is generally cited as the oldest named coffee blend, pairing the fruity, winy coffees shipped out of the Yemeni port of al-Makha with the heavier, earthier beans of Dutch-controlled Java. That Oscar Tschirky prints roasting instructions at all is the interesting part: through most of the nineteenth century American households bought green coffee and roasted it themselves, in a skillet or in a cranked drum set into a stove lid hole exactly as described here. Packaged pre-roasted coffee, sold in sealed paper by firms trading on freshness, had become dominant in cities by the time this book appeared in the 1890s, though home roasting persisted, particularly in rural households. The instructions here address a reader told to procure a small coffee-roaster and use a domestic stove lid, and the twenty-five-minute hand-cranked drum was the tool for it.