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I am a recent convert (2wks) from my coffee to brewed chocolate, and I don't ever see myself going back. I started with the brand you see on FB ALL THE TIME... and I want to try my hand at roasting myself. I'm a more than adept cook, baker and already have grown at least 8 different types of chilis, dried, roasted, etc.. you get the picture.
I want to order a batch of roasted beans to keep me going, and I find I like that deeper, heartier choc flavor, what is your recommendation? I was thinking the Wild Harvest and the Alchemy, but I'm also very intrigued about
I am a little nervous about beans. I live in an apartment now, so for the winter this would be strictly oven roasting. Can you be truly successful in a basic oven roasting method? Thank you. for your time.

 

I’m really happy to hear you have discovered brewing cocoa.

I can appreciate you are an adept cook and baker.  That gives me some hope that when I jump into why it is going to be challenging for you to do at home, you’ll be able to appreciate why and then make a decision if it is something you truly want to delve into. Spoiler: I’m hoping/guessing not.

Before I get to that, it is probably worthwhile talking a little about brewing cocoa in general.  Brewing cocoa is roasted cocoa beans, ground to a consistency of coarse salt.  Quite a few people want to grind it finer for more flavor, but as I point out in my video about it, this isn’t ideal as more flavor does not mean more good flavor.  Usually all you end up with is a more astringent brew.

Oh, and just because it seems to always come up, let’s deal with a couple questions before getting into roasting.

  1. You cannot use an espresso machine or stove top mocha pot with brewing cocoa.  I’ve written about espresso and there seems to be no solution and moka pots basically turn into a bomb. 

  2. You cannot use a quality burr coffee grinder.  The oils (around 50% by weight) cake the burrs and clog.  You must use a blade grinder of some ilk. We use and recommend the Rico Grinder

Alright.  Onto roasting.  Technically you can take any roasted cocoa bean, grind it and brew it and you will have brewing cocoa.  Personally though I find this makes a pretty thin and unsatisfying brew.  Some people though do like that, and if that is the case, follow any of the oven roasting methods I outline and you are good to go.

I’ll assume though that you like what we do with our brewing cocoa so with my general stance on ‘no trade secrets’ I’ll share what we do.  For any single origin brewing cocoa we roast the primary bean a little deeper and then add 5-10% (it varies depending upon what we taste tested) of cocoa roasted VERY VERY dark.  Some might even call it burned (although technically it isn’t burned, it is near black).  For this reason, I can’t really suggest any bean to buy on its own because it isn’t going to have the dark roast added. And this is where you are going to run into problems oven roasting at home.

And here we go.  I’m going of on a demonstrative tangent.  In addition to my love of chocolate making, coffee roasting, bread baking and so many other food related passions, I also brew beer.  At some point I got it in my head to roast all my own barley for making an Imperial Stout.  In the same vein, if you are not informed to the subtle nature  of roasted barley, you would think you are burning it but it isn’t quite there but it is VERY dark and gives a lovely roasty depth of flavor to your brew (yes, this is where I got my idea for brewing cocoa).   In beer, this is what I was making.

 
barley.jpg
 

The issue I ran head long into is that getting barley to this level of darkness produces a ton of smoke - thick, heavy, cough inducing, eye watering smoke.  I’d love to show you a photo but I’m simply not going to do that to my house again.  And it takes, subjectively speaking, a long time.  You need to get the barely up to around 400 F but the smoke starts well before that and continues for 10-20 minutes as you get to that lovely deep brown/black color.  In the meantime your house in uninhabitable due to all the smoke.  It was so bad I ended up having to take it outside to my grill to finish it.

And here is the thing.  Cocoa is worse.  When we roast, it is in a commercial roaster and it is ventilated with two a 1200 CFM fans and our roasting room still fills with smoke to the point we can’t be in there and have to have to door closed lest we smoke out the entire warehouse.

So how would you do it at in an oven at home?  I literally can’t think of a way due to the smoke.  I can’t think of a single exhaust system that would do be up to the task.  Should you decide you still want to try, what you are shooting for is getting the beans to a deep brown, bordering on black, where the surface temperature of the beans is around 400 F.  Most likely it is going to take you 45-60 minutes to get there, with half of that time dealing with eye watering smoke pouring out….and if you happen to misjudge where you are in the roast, the chances of a full blown fire (think horrible and nasty oil fire since cocoa is 50% oil) are not insignificant.

If that happens to make you a touch nervous, great, I’ve done my job here.  I just can’t recommend roasting like that in an inside oven which leads to trying to do it on an outside grill.  When I did my barley, again the smoke was copious, eye watering and horrible…..and I didn’t end up with a great roast because I could not get in there enough to keep the barley stirred well (see eye water, phlegm producing smoke above) and some did end up burned on the bottom but not even deep brown on the top.

What can you do instead?  You could use a Behmor 2000 since it was build to roast coffee to those smoke inducing levels.  You probably still don’t want to roast inside as the smoke suppression afterburners were not designed for the amount of smoke this will produce but it will give you are lovely even roast and it is safer to do it this way if you are outside.  In this case you can just roast by color.  The main tip I would give you is treat it as you would coffee and not cocoa. By that I mean you probably only want to roast 8-12 oz instead of the suggested 2-2.5 lb of cocoa.

I’ll mention one other option.  Two of our blends are taken to 335 F and 365 F respectively and don’t have any dark roasted cocoa added.  At 335 F the beans are just starting to color and at 365 F they are just tipping into the dark but not black range….but both are still smoking too much for oven roasting.

As you can see, it isn’t so much a matter of being good at cooking and baking and whatnot, but smoke management which is a different animal altogether, unless you happen to also be an expert at blackened Cajun style food.   Even then, you can see smoke is still an issue and the level of smoke there is a pittance to what you can expect from cocoa.

To answer your last question directly, no, you really can’t roast brewing cocoa successfully in an indoor oven….p.s. a convection oven will just make matters worse.

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