What is Air Roasting?

Have you had coffee that tastes burnt, acidic, or bitter? What about a sour stomach or an unpleasant, jittery feeling in your body? We all have had this at some point or another. Many people attribute this to a particular brand, roast, or specific coffee bean. In most cases it's the roasting equipment or drinking old, stale coffee that is creating these flavors.

"Why does Zebulon Coffee Roasters air roast their coffee?"

Unique flavor of Air Roasted Coffee:

In the entire world, only 2% of all the coffee beans grown and harvested are air roasted. That’s it.  

Nearly all of the other coffee in the world is drum roasted.  Roasting a bean the right way makes all the difference when it comes to the flavor of your coffee. Proper roasting won’t turn average beans into amazing beans, you have to start with high quality beans first. What proper roasting will do is bring out the best qualities  in each individual bean, highlighting its unique flavor profile.  

With Air Roasted Coffee you taste the coffee not the roaster. It’s the air that roasts the coffee not the surface of the roaster. So the coffee has a very clean taste that is intensely aromatic, minus the acids and bitter tars that are produced by conventional roasters.  

Most drum roasters today introduce hot air into their roast chamber, then the beans tumble and touch the hot surfaces to roast, like clothing in a clothes dryer. Air roasting levitates the beans on a fluidized bed of hot air, keeping the beans moving and not scorching on hot surfaces. The sole use of hot air greatly increases the rate of heat transference to the beans, creating a cleaner, more aromatic roast, free of bitter tasting tars.

 Our Roasting Process:

Suspend the beans by roasting them on a bed of hot air called the fluid bed (the fluid bed is a vortex inside of the roasting chamber.  The vortex allows each individual bean to be roasted evenly and to perfection.)

When the coffee beans pop and crack during air roasting, a skin on the beans called the chaff is blown away from the beans and into a separate chamber (this is important because if the chaff stayed on, it would burn and smoke, giving the coffee a somewhat bitter, smoky flavor that would mask the natural flavor of the specific bean)

The heat of air roasting is evenly distributed throughout the entire batch of coffee beans, thus creating a balanced, roasted coffee bean.