I described last month a roast of Yemen Mokha Mattari from Sweet Marias. Despite some mishaps during roasting, it turned out particularly well as brewed coffee. Last Friday I decided to roast up some more of these beans, but take them darker for use as espresso. The claim is that Yemen's like a lot of rest to really come together flavor-wise, so this is a good test. I also added the picture above to show the "before and after" of the coffee.
Here is the profile:
As you can see, another minute and a half of roast compared to the previous gets you into second crack. This is what I was looking for in this roast. The espresso extraction process can really exacerbate acidic flavors, and light roasts in general don't do well. I roasted this one dark (for me) to get better balance.
As an interesting aside, you can take a look at the variation in color post-roast (common in dry-processed beans) in this picture:
If you compare this to something like the picture in the blog's title (which is a Guatemalan coffee), you should see the differerce.
So, what about the espresso? I tried this coffee three ways (shots pulled from my Rancilio Silvia machine):
Double espresso
Cappucino (double shot in ~6oz of milk)
Double ristretto
Now you are starting to understand the caffeine jag I am on....
Anyway, this stuff was darn good. The espresso was very intensely woody, with a packed house of "spice bazaar" tastes. Chewy and very long lasting. Great stuff, but a bit on the rough side. In milk, it really shined. The spice notes were still there, and solid chocolate notes cut well through the milk. The ristretto was probably the best of the bunch. A lot of the roughness was gone, and it was smooth, sweet, spicy, and exotic. I didn't get any real fruitiness in this one; it was more in the woody camp. Perhaps another roast treatment would pull out more fruit.
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