Saturday, August 19, 2023

Interview with Peter Giuliano + How to Roast Coffee

Interview with Peter Giuliano

BH Unlimited Update, Aug 19th 2023

Chatting with Peter Giuliano is always a special experience. He is one of our industry's most broadly experienced coffee people. He was a founder of Counter Culture Coffee; he's worked as a coffee buyer, barista trainer, and cupper. He's also held a lot of executive positions on the board of the SCA and Roasters Guild and, most recently, he's headed up the market research and scientific investigation for the Specialty Coffee Association, currently in the role of Executive Director of the Coffee Science Foundation. But the coolest thing about Peter Giuliano is that in 1988 he got his start in coffee working as a barista in San Diego.

Peter Giuliano

You might know him as the guy who used to commentate the WBC live stream. You might also know him as the blogger behind the Coffee Variety or Starwars Character series. Peter has kept a really cool blog over many years called Pax Coffea — it's coffee, history and a whole lot more — the latest post is about the origins of Ranch dressing. Most recently Peter co-authored the very much updated and very well researched Coffee Sensory and Cupping Handbook. And he has been heading up the SCA's efforts in revamping their 20-year-old cupping system — with some quite radical, thought-provoking and very ethically sounding changes coming through in their Beta version of what they're calling the Coffee Value Assessment. Jem Challender, our Dean of Studies, who helped design Barista Hustle's own Cupping Protocols, compares notes with Peter Giuliano in this very informative interview.

How to Roast Coffee

The concept of the between-batch protocol (aka BBP) is surely one of Scott Rao's most impactful contributions to coffee roasting. Managing the thermal energy in your roaster to keep perfect consistency from one batch to the next is challenging, but once you get it right it takes a lot of the guesswork out of roasting each batch.

Charge temperature, on the other hand, gets a lot of attention in discussions about roast profiles, but it turns out to be much less important than an effective BBP in controlling your roast profiles. Instead, Scott prefers to think of charge temperature as simply the final step in a well-designed BBP.

In this week's lessons, Scott reveals his strategy for developing the perfect BBP for your roaster, and simplifies the process of choosing an appropriate charge temperature for your roasts. He also discusses how to adjust your protocols to handle different batch sizes.

We then round off the chapter with a discussion on how to plan your roasting day to make it as easy as possible to manage the thermal energy in your roaster. Roasting decaf first is a reasonable approach for novice roasters, but you might find it is not the optimal solution once you have perfected your warm-up procedure and BBP.

Push your roasting skills to the next level with the latest lessons, available now to all BH Unlimited subscribers.

Trail Notes from MICE

As you may have heard, Australia's diminutive but quite charming Melbourne International Coffee Expo (MICE) is on at the mo. We went yesterday to check out the action. (As you know, at BH we receive no income from other companies for endorsements — our only income comes from what you pay for your subscriptions, so the following observations are a reflection of stuff we actually like.)

There were a few gear highlights. We got to see a prototype of the [Sh]aeroPress XL which, whilst looking a bit like a bazooka, was quite nice to see.

We also saw a prototype of the Nanofoamer Pro, the hands-free version of a new foaming machine which we blogged about a couple of months back. That device has the potential to be a game-changer for the world of milk-based espresso. It dispenses with the need for a steam boiler which could hopefully spawn a new generation of boilerless 'shot-maker' espresso machines, which would be a lot lighter on the carbon footprint and on your wallet. After seeing a demonstration at the show, we can say for certain that it makes absolutely superb micro foam.

We had a play with the Tone 04 prototype — which promises to be the world's first attractive batch brewer, with temperature profiling and flow profiling capabilities to boot.

And, you may be interested to know, you can have a go on Barista Hustle's new AutocombTM at the Barista Supplies stand at MICE, too.

Coffee Education — Without the Advertising

At BH we never do ads for other company's products on our website. There's no product placement in any of our courses, newsletters or blog posts. Our only income comes from what you pay for your subscriptions.

When you see machinery or coffee gear mentioned in any of our educational material, or featured in our course videos, we have chosen to use that equipment because we like using it, because we think it's historically significant in the evolution of the espresso machine, or because it shows you something you need to see about modern coffee culture. It's as simple as that.