MILAN – Green Coffee: A Guide for Roasters and Buyers by Chris Kornman – researcher and author as well as director of education at The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab and Tasting Room in Oakland, California -, is the handbook published by Roast Magazine, which offers a broad view of the mechanisms behind the final product that everyone in the world consumes in various forms: coffee.
It starts, the title itself suggests, with the green grain: a raw material dissected by the author, whose biological structure, cultivation, processing, and places of origin are recounted.
Green Coffee, the 179-page guide
Aimed at roasters, traders, but also consumers, as well as anyone interested in embarking on this exploratory journey along a complex supply chain starting with green. The book – the author himself tells it – is the sum of years of professional experience in the field, collected in a single text available to readers.
It is a balanced blend of theory and practice that traces the supply chain from cultivation, starting with the extraction of the seed from the coffee plant, to delving into the dynamics that govern its trade. It goes into detail about the physical analysis of the beans – size, density, water content and presence of defects – which then supports the principles of proper roasting to get the right end result in the cup.
Also very useful is the author’s part of suggestions from the same author with respect to possible problems that might occur in the logistical phase of green transportation and ways to manage critical issues along the supply chain.
Finally, the chapter devoted to proper storage methods in the warehouse is interesting, as is the one that focuses on the decaffeination process.
A comprehensive overview, this is Green Coffee A guide for Roasters and Buyers, which has the quality of not proposing a static view of this raw material, but a flexible approach that respects the greatest truth with respect to coffee: it is an agricultural product and as such, it does not know univocal answers and solutions. On the contrary, only guidelines that can then adapt to different factors.
Author’s Final Thoughts
The pre-requisite for becoming an excellent roaster, is indeed green coffee. Which, however, needs to be analyzed by paying attention to the nuances between the standard benchmark metrics, with a holistic understanding that allows those who are approaching this craft to make informed decisions.
It is available for purchase at the following link, https://www.roastmagazine.com/shop/products/greencoffee, at the price of $59.95 + Shipping
