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I have intentionally been hiding and diminishing my joy of and excitement about life for years in order to make other people feel more comfortable.
After one too many stale batches from Peets, Victoria and I have decided to invest in an upgrade to our home roasting gear. Sometime this week we’ll receive our new roaster and 8 lbs of green beans.
Besides the high incidence of stale beans (and subsequent dreck espresso), Peets seems to average a roughly 25% runt rate. Here’s Vick and I sorting out the runts.
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What are the runts, other than smaller? Do they taste funny?
I’m going to try beans from Philz this week, I think.
Runts are imperfect beans. In many cases they are fragments of beans that blew up during the roast. These fragments, as well as the more cylindrical runts are evidence of substandard green beans. I recall from my roasting days that I would average about 2-5% runts.
In my Peets exercise I didn’t even bother to remove the beans that had divots blown out of their cell walls. This is another sign of a bad bean.
In many cases the fragments are the result of mechanical intervention, but the end result (bunk coffee) is the same, due to the rapid off-gassing of CO2 that ensues. This off-gassing causes the beans to loose their good qualities.