Roasting: Highlighting the origins of the beans.

Roasting coffee is a dynamic mix of art and science, where you transform the raw green coffee into a caramelized, aromatic, thing of beauty. The roaster’s job is to bring out each bean’s unique flavors, and while the roasters cannot make a bad bean any better, they can ruin a great bean.

Think of coffee beans as you would a fine wine, and the beans as the grapes. Each variety having its own individual characteristics, with these brought out in the roasting process. A Sumatra will be roasted a little longer to bring out its syrupy, full bodied flavor, and a Coata Rica requires less time to maintain its bright, high notes.
Our Seaside Sips Roasters know if you take a Panama La Esmeralda Estate Gesha past a full city roast (435 degrees F) into what’s know as “Second Crack” you have ruined the citrus, jasmine flowers, cherry, passion fruit, and mango flavors that would have poured forth from this fine bean. This knowledge, gained from years of roasting experience, and the every watchful eye of our master roaster Bob, is necessary to bring out the best character of each bean variety we carry.

This is our main roasting machine, a Pobat L5, a great roaster, basically unchanged for 50 years; why change a good thing.

For small specialty and test batches we use our San Franciscan Sample Roaster. While smaller in stature it produces the best small batch roasts we have ever sampled, equal to our Probat but on a much smaller scale.

Like to find out more about roasting coffee, come to one of our monthly coffee cupping’s; held at 2:00 PM the second Sunday of every month.
Learn about the many different roasting profiles we use, see the San Franciscan in action, and sample some of our latest offerings.

Today may coffee lovers, are also looking for a little more intense flavors then the delicate tones offered by a beans origin, and for them we off a wide variety of additional flavors.
We start with our excellent Seaside Roast blend, then just out of the roaster the beans are mixed with the best flavored syrups available, coating the beans with a slight glaze. This flavor is then locked to each bean just waiting to be released in your cup. Give our Carmel Apple a try, it’s a classic boardwalk treat.