Fire in the Hole!

<Read this post in your best Anthony Bourdain voice and I promise you it will sound better>

Tonight I made my first fired tea.  In several batches.  It was harder than I thought it would be, and it didn’t come out exactly right each time.  In fact, it came out exactly right only once, curiously enough the first time I tried.  My shop smelled like a 1970′s Pink Floyd concert.  But it worked.  And thus begins another life-long obsession, I suspect.

What is fired tea, you ask?  It’s green tea, roasted.  The one that got me started on this is hojicha, a tea I first tried while Japan.  Hojicha, the traditionally charcoal-fired version of bancha, or second blush of sencha, sounds like a romantic, artisan creation.  And it is.  But in that uniquely Japanese way, it is also eminently practical.

You see, bancha is an inferior tea.  The first of seasonal green tea is called sencha, and it is universally prized around the world.  After the branches are bare, the second push arrives, and is harvested.  This ugly duckling of a tea, coarse and twiggy, is called bancha.  If bancha were coffee, it would be Vietnamese robusta.  Yuck.   So in true Japanese fashion, they take something undesirable, and turn it into something prized.  With fire.  Hojicha.

Sencha

Bancha. This is actually the best looking bancha I've ever seen; it looks better than some sencha. I wouldn't fire anything that looked this good. Well, OK, maybe I would. Fire, heh heh.

It’s understandable why the Japanese were driven to do this.  Any of you who have been to Japan know that real estate is at a premium.  They can’t just farm more land and harvest more sencha to make enough to earn a living.  No, they need to utilize the land to its fullest.  And hojicha is one way of doing that.  Hoji magically transforms the rough and relatively flavorless bancha into a beautiful, less astringent tea, with lovely grain and cereal flavors.  It’s just short of miraculous, really.

Hojicha. This one is a little twiggy.

So once again, I had the distinct advantage of knowing just enough to be dangerous, and not nearly enough to be useful.  If there’s one thing I can do, I figured, it’s roast.  And roast I did.  How hot?  How long?  How much air?  How much agitation?  All complete mysteries to me.  And they pretty much still are.  But I got it right once, and that was all it took.  I am hooked.

It turns out that hojicha is usually pan fired over charcoal.  In retrospect, I can clearly see the wisdom of this technique.  As you might have guessed, that’s not exactly what I did.  What I did… is to remain a secret.  Why? Well, the obvious reason is proprietary competitive advantage.  And that’s true, to a certain extent.  But the real reason is embarrassment.  I know I looked like Rube Goldberg, but with enough BTUs to torch a house.  What I did tonight was dangerous and silly.  And fun.  And unexpectedly productive.  And my secret.

I would offer you some of my hoji to try, but the batch I got right yielded just enough for a few servings.  I sent what was left after my sampling to a friend in Atlanta with his coffee order.  I look forward, as always, to his sometimes harsh, but always honest feedback.  I suspect he will encourage me to continue.

And as I research the field, I realize that hojicha is but one type of fired tea.  People have been doing this to all kinds of beverages for a very long time.  Looks like I have some catching up to do.

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com

WWJD (What Would Jim Drink today?): Hoji!  I drank all of the batch that worked, now I’m working on some of the less perfect batches, and they’re still good.

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On Roasting, Shipping and Carbon Footprints… Does Local Trump Food Miles?

Photo Source: http://www.freshandeasy.com/blog/2007_05_01_archive.html
I can’t wait to have one of these stores near me

I’ve been so busy roasting, cupping and adding new coffees that I haven’t had time to pontificate on deep and meaningful things in the space lately.  So here’s a little something to chew on…

I’ve been thinking about carbon footprints lately.  We’ve spent a lot of money to help design, debug and install the ultra-efficient Revelation roaster (note that the photos on Dan’s website are of our roaster).  I would like to promote the environmental advantages of our roasting system, and locally that’s really a no-brainer.  Our machine utilizes catalytic oxidation to eliminate smoke, then we recirculate the hot air back to the roaster.  The net effect is a MUCH more efficient system, as I will describe.  So if you lived here and required no shipping for your coffee, and you had a choice between buying coffee from us, and from somebody with a conventional roasting system, you would have less carbon impact if you bought it from us.  This much is certainly true, as I will describe.  The question I would like to answer is, what if you lived far enough away that it required shipping?  Does efficient roast + ship equal less carbon impact than local roast on conventional system?  What is the shipping distance where efficient roast loses out to shipping?

I was inspired by a paper from Tyler Coleman and Pablo Paster, entitled “Red, White and Green: The Cost of Carbon in the Global Wine Trade”, published by the American Association of Wine Economists.  I exchanged email with Pablo, and was able to adapt his work to my coffee question above.

The first question to answer is the difference in carbon output between my roasting system and a conventional system of the same size.  For sake of comparison, I went to the specifications for a conventional system that I was considering before I went with the Revelation; I made sure to use the specs for a system that also utilized catalytic oxidation to eliminate the smoke contribution, hence the differences I’m comparing are carbon due to energy consumption.  I’ll skip the calculations here and jump to the results: our Revelation produces 0.00004 ton CO2e per pound roasted.  A comparable, new conventional system produces 0.00181 ton CO2e per pound roasted.  Ours is favorable by 0.00177 ton CO2e per pound, or a whopping 97.7%.  That’s how much emitted CO2 you eliminate by buying your coffee from us instead of another local alternative, assuming you require no shipping.

So the question is then whether shipping generates more than 0.00177 ton CO2 per pound.  That’s 1607 grams CO2e per pound of coffee.  At some point it’s bound to happen, so how far can I ship it to you and still have favorable carbon differential?  Turns out the answer is pretty darn far.  Anywhere in the country, in fact.  Pablo’s research enabled me to answer the question; here’s the summary.

Let’s assume air freight for a minute.  At the end of a long string of math, it turns out that air freight generates 0.459 grams CO2e per mile shipped.  So I can air freight coffee up to 3500 miles and still produce less CO2 than roasting the same coffee locally in a conventional system.  Truck shipping is 2.26 times MORE favorable, i.e., lass carbon production, than air shipping (0.203 grams CO2e per mile).

So let’s say you live in Charlottesville, Virginia, 231 miles from my shop in Morrisville NC.  Buying a pound of coffee from me generates 36.3 grams CO2e.  Shipping it generates another 46.9 grams CO2e, for a total of 83.2 grams CO2e.  If you bought the same coffee locally and required no shipping, a conventional system would generate 1643.5 grams CO2e.  You achieve a 94.9% reduction in emitted CO2 by buying the coffee from me and shipping it.

What if you lived in Providence, Rhode Island, 683 miles away, and required air freight?  Your local alternative is still 1643.5 grams CO2e.  My roasting is still 36.3 grams.  Shipping adds another 313.5 grams CO2e, for a grand total of 349.8 grams CO2e.  You achieve a 78.7% reduction in emitted CO2 by buying from me and having it shipped by air.  California?  You still achieve a 14% reduction via air freight, and even more if shipped by truck.  Pretty cool, huh?

So if you buy local to keep your food dollars in your local economy and maintain relationships, you should keep doing that.  If you buy locally because you think food miles are adding to your carbon footprint, you would be right if you bought some coffee roasted on a conventional system.  But if you are trying to reduce your carbon footprint while still getting great coffee, you should buy it from us.

http://www.greenroasting.com

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The People Have Spoken: Brew-In I is a success

Alcohol, open flame, high voltage and unlimited espresso, all laid down to a country music soundtrack. You can’t get this in Corporate America, folks. You know it’s a good party when it starts at 10 AM with somebody handing you a drink they claim is “a good morning beer” (probably in direct violation of some archaic North Carolina law like the one that prevents me from buying wine on my Sunday morning grocery shopping trips. Thank goodness we can finally, legally, buy decent craft beers here, and buy wine by mail, both recent developments), and somewhere over the course of the day you find yourself wondering what kind of insurance you have. Yes, indeed, our first Brew-In event was a success.

So what is Brew-In, you may ask? Well, it all started innocently enough like most good things do. Liking beer the way I do, but lacking the requisite talent to make it myself (or at least the time to learn), I asked my master brewer friend Jason if he would come over and christen our shop with a little brewing session. Why did I have that drain installed in the floor, after all? From there things started to snowball.

Jason suggested he invite a few other brewers. Heck yeah! And about that time, I encountered the Coffee In Action girls on the internet, and invited them to join us on their whirlwind sustainable coffee tour (imagine my relief when I confirmed they were over 21). Well, as long as we’re inviting people, I thought, may as well throw it open to everyone, right? I just started telling people… great beer, even better coffee, cool people, interesting conversation, in an unusual place. And a crock pot full of chili. Just stop by!

And come, they did. We probably had 50 people through over the course of the day, hearty souls who braved the unseasonably cold weather we experienced that weekend. Rosie the Roaster, our hugely eco-friendly system that causes us to burst with pride, sat quietly for the day because her fan motor is rather noisy right now and the replacement is on its way (long, sad story with my stupidity being the punchline). And she roasts too much coffee for small demonstrations. But our sample roaster (Sammy, don’t ask me where these names come from) performed admirably all day, and everybody who wanted to had a chance to be their own roastmaster. We roasted, we blended, we cupped, and then we did it over… and over, and over… again. Amazingly, I never get tired of this stuff.

The feedback I’ve gotten is that people were informed, entertained and fully caffeinated at the end of the day. In several weeks, the beer Jason brewed (a stout) will be ready for kegging. At that time, he’s going to give me some so I can turn it into a coffee stout. I was inspired by our recent trip to Kona, where I enjoyed the Pipeline Porter from the Kona Brewing Company. But I also like Terrapin’s Wake and Bake. I’m thinking the beer will suggest how I should finish it.

In the meantime, plans are beginning to form for Brew-In II. We’re thinking another Sunday in early Autumn. We’ll keep you posted! Meanwhile, I have lots of people who have interest in coming by for demos and custom blending, so I’m thinking about establishing some semi-regular times to do that, stay tuned.

http://www.muddydogcoffee.com/

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