Making coffee from scratch (is hard)

this video has been sponsored by brilliant it was only about a year ago when I suddenly realized that I didn't have any idea what coffee was or how it was produced I mean I knew that it was grown and harvested in places with warmer climates but other than that in my world the only thing that I ever saw were these little black beans so to get to the bottom of this I decided to do a quick Google search and almost immediately I discovered that it came from a fruit called the coffee cherry and this genuinely

surprised me this is because in my opinion they kind of just looked like little red grapes and they really didn't look like anything special I also thought that it was really interesting that a seemingly generic fruit could be turned into this and this really made me want to try doing the whole process myself where I start with the cherries and go all the way to some hopeful nice tasting coffee but with that being said I was actually able to get some of the cherries and I have them all right here the only problem is that

they aren't exactly Super Fresh and we had to freeze them because uh surprisingly no one really produces coffee in Canada so we actually to get all of this from one of our members on Discord who uh Oreo and she was very nice harvested them packed them all together sent it to us and they were Fresh then but we we froze them because we were leaving town when they arrived but apparently this shouldn't really affect much the only thing it means is that we are of course going to have to thaw them out I mean we

can take a look at one right now before we do that okay I mean they look good I guess it's a little darker than a regular grape but yeah I mean my assumption was that they're going to be more red but I think the the species of coffee that this is is I think it was a mixture of gisha and coutura I don't know if I'm pronouncing either of those right or what honestly that really means for the coffee but maybe someone out there knows either way though to thought out we're going to just use

a bucket of water [Applause] there you go so I think when they're frozen they probably expand a little bit which is why they're all floating but we can see here that I guess as they thaw out a bunch of them are slowly sinking and that's good because this is letting us separate the good ones from the crappier ones where the crappier ones should stay floating but I don't know exactly what that is I guess it's like the floater ones it means the shells broken air got in it or something it's like rotted a bit or

something it's overripe I was looking online and some Mass producers of coffee they actually do use the floaters for like instant coffee oh okay I mean we could do that to then we could have just like two sides and see if there's a difference we could make a floater batch and a sinker bat B I think that's kind of done right I mean I don't see any more sinkers yeah I think it's basically done so what I'm going to do is separate them out and in this first little bowl I'm going to put all of

the floaters yeah we got a lot of floaters yeah I didn't realize there were so many floaters damn oh they're so soft now but I'll keep transferring all of them okay okay these are all of our floaters and then for the sinkers oh God this is not going to be easy there's even a broken one what is this there's so many broken ones and bad ones in there I don't know I feel like there's no difference between I feel like there's more busted up ones I mean there's always the possibility that some of them had

cracks in them and got water and it sank that's true but the the sinkers are generally better quality that's just they do look there's something about them that looks better I don't know if you look at the skin it looks tighter whereas I don't know there's something about them that looks shinier and Tighter where a lot of these have like wrinklier skin I don't know hard to tell I'm almost done done the last oh that was cold what I want to do next is see what's inside of them and I think I'll just choose a

random victim here nice firm victim chopped okay and and that's interesting it's hard to tell now but the bean I guess there's two here have been cut in half and I guess I can squish them out whoa oh smells like a plant it literally smells like a plant it just smells like generic plant I really think it smells like old grapes to be H or grapes and I'm also going to take squeeze one of these I'm going to take out an intact Bean oh look oh there you go yeah that looks much more like it

now I want to do the exact same thing to the supposedly crappier ones to see if there is a difference and I'll slice it open oh oh that's interesting so I think the big difference here is in the seed it doesn't look as dense if you take the good one and put it next to it look at the difference yeah there's like a it's like shriveled so clearly the good ones do look better but I think what's also important is I want to know if there's a taste difference so I'm going to start with the

good one H that's pretty interesting it's like really hard to chew but just just a generic plant material now I'll try the crappier one it tastes like more of the fruit has leaked into the seed but overall it's still mostly just generic plant H well with that all being said what I have to do now is basically get all of these seeds out of the skin and industrially they have some home they have a machine that just kind of skins it automatically but unfortunately we didn't invest in uh you know a coffee production factory line

so I just have to do it by hand which you know that makes better coffee right more authentic I guess all we need are some bowls and first transfer over the first bad one we did here now we just need to burst some cherries okay I think I at the same time I can like weed out the ones that look extra bad that one looks kind of weird I feel like I've been here for hours but I don't think that's true no it's been like 15 minutes now oh God still feels like an eternity I

would never make it on an assembly line it just doesn't it like clearly has gone down a lot but it just doesn't feel it feels like it's just stuck man doing this 8 hours a day would be I think that's why they invented the machine yeah okay only got several more to go okay the last one done well done the bad ones now we need to move to the good ones and we start again oh you threw a skin in there did I yeah I threw a bunch in why are you throwing skins in there

cuz my brain is malfunctioning ah we're so close there's only six left four two 2 one zero finally done that wasn't that bad but either way we now have a bunch of lower quality seeds and then our good quality seeds and the first thing I've noticed is that as these were sitting here they all started to Brown and I think that's just because just oxidation in the air but that's fine F because the next thing that we have to do is basically leave them out in air and we have to turn all of these gooey

seeds into nice crispy seeds by drying them and the first thing I'll do is get a tray and the goal I guess is to just dump them all out or dump as many out as I can we want to spread them out evenly so we have like one layer of seeds okay I think that looks like one layer so I'll get another tray and some more all just put them all spread these out okay that's perfect and now for the the good stuff and there's so much less we don't even have enough to fill it

okay I I think that looks good so we have two full trays of the lower quality coffee and one half filled tray of the higher quality stuff and now we just have to throw them all into a food dehydrator okay got the food dehydrator and now I'll just load in our good stuff on top and then our other lower quality stuff below it and finally the last tray on the lowest run now have to turn it on and uh yeah I guess we'll come back to it it's finally time to check them out hopefully they're

dry enough so turn it off pop it open and uh okay it definitely gotten way Browner and I think that's normal based on the process that we did we kind of ever mention this but I believe that the process we're doing on these beans is called the honey process because once we popped it out of the Cherry we didn't wash it or process it in any way and we left all of the sugars on it when it dried so I think that's what's giving it the brownness but either way I'm just going to try to

pick some off the tray of course they're all super stuck because of the sticky sugar that was left on it but they're pretty tough now so I don't think I I'm really going to run the risk of breaking them also the one thing that I that we don't know yet or the one thing that I'm assuming at this point is that we dried them enough based on what I saw on line you kind of want them to I think around like 10% moisture so to test this I got this fancy machine that I preset to

coffee and uh we just fill it here oh no I think you squish it shut okay I don't really know how it works but it says that the moisture in this batch is 9 .6 and I I feel like that that's probably true for all the rest of the beans too so I think that's good now we just have to basically break off all of the other beans from the trays [Music] now we have a huge batch of this stuff and then I don't know that's at least a cup I think but either way I

think what I want to do now is just quickly I really want to know what these now dry beans taste like to see if there's any difference to the uh I guess I know describe the wet ones and I'm going to choose this one which is I know looks like a generic little bean oh it tastes exactly the same as before except it's rock solid I don't know what I expected but either way at this point it still absolutely tastes nothing like coffee and to get the distinct and I guess unique coffee flavor and Aroma

out of this what we apparently have to do next is roast it and that will make it go from right now just tasting like a hard weird plant to apparently really amazing coffee okay we need our roaster that we uh apparently last used when making the Bismuth knife so you know there's some remnants of that but as long as it doesn't drip into our coffee we're okay right yeah it's fine I I I either way the other thing that we'll need is a pan and I should say that there are a lot of different ways

to roast coffee but from what I read online the simplest and cheapest way was to just use a pan so that's what I kind of want to try and uh yeah I'm just going to go ahead and throw a bunch into the pan and I'm starting with the less good ones because I obviously have no idea what I'm doing here and I've never done this before so I think I'll use about half I'll just spread them out and uh now we just have to turn on the burner okay fire should oh Fire's on and I'll

just kind of move them around now I have no no idea how this is going to go but I I have confidence I have confidence for some reason something that I should also mention is that most coffee beans at this stage are called green coffee beans but ours are obviously not green and I think this is just because of the honey process that I mentioned earlier there's just a bunch of sugar on it that gives it a different color uh also I should also probably mention what we're even trying to do here um at least

based on what I saw on line there are four main stages that the coffee will pass through and the first major one is just dehydration where the heat is just driving off moisture and what we're also trying to do which is majorly important is a reaction called oh God it's starting to smoke uh a reaction called the myard reaction which is causing sugars to react act with the proteins and that makes a huge array of different molecules with different smells and flavor profiles and that's a major way that the unique coffee flavor and smell is

made uh and then the third major reaction going on is just caramelization where a lot of the sugar under the heat is caramelizing and that just adds to the depth of flavor that is in the beans then finally we're also doing pyrolysis which means that using heat we're just breaking down sugars proteins and other stuff in the Coffee Bean and this apparently gives it that characteristic roasted coffee flavor one thing I should also say is that we're not just heating it indefinitely and forever and the goal here is to get it to something known as

first crack which is basically what is considered a light roast and it's called first crack because you hear cracking for the first time I don't know why do they look so burnt it's definitely interesting oh it's smoking I can't tell if I'm failing but I think I am I don't hear any cracking yet no so we're not even there come on crack they're looking more like coffee beans yeah but why they're just like black this is like the darkest roast you could possibly get yeah it really smells like burned beans right now like there's definitely

zero coffee Aroma coming from these right now yeah that's true all I know is I'm happy we only used half yeah [Music] come on we're not even at what we're not even at the first crack I fear these are just going to turn into charcoal I still we got to see this out we got to get to that first crack no matter what that's messed up the blest gam I've ever seen dude this is crazy I'm starting to feel like first crack might never happen we might have done something something wrong so I'm going to

I'm going to choose one of our amazing beans okay and we'll crack it open just to see what's inside oh no wow it's it's just pure Ash looks like charcoal it is charcoal so I I I think this is that we heated things way too quickly I need to try one though that's the only way to verify you know what that's horrendously crispy and obviously burnt but it's somehow still kind of good i s swear look take this Bean don't even just try the whole bean that's definitely H there's definitely some coffee flavor but it's

just shrouded and [Music] burned so I think we can officially officially call this one who could have known that something was going wrong when they were turning black clearly I have absolutely no Cofe pen roasting skills and considering how much we just lost I I don't think I can try this again thankfully though as a backup plan I also got this thing uh little coffee raster from Amazon so it's supposed to just heat it and this thing turns I guess and just like mixes things around automatically and I mean as far as I know it's

supposed to work pretty well but either way I'll put this aside for a second get rid of the burner put the lid on turn it on and it says to heat it to like 240 and yeah that's about it just got to let it sit here now to preheat which is says it'll take 10 minutes it should be good to go so I think all we need to do is just dump our beans in again please don't burn the moment I just drop it in okay good sign so far okay I'll commit the rest put

the lid on and now according to the manual it says to just leave it like this for 15 minutes or so I am scared that they're going to burn but I will say it looks a lot better than the other one it looks like they're all getting darker at the same rate versus before where some of them I think were black at this point yeah I think it's pretty clear that heating it slowly and at not super high temperatures is very important it's like a delicate and slow process they're actually looking like C coffee beans

they are it looks like it's actually working what's nice is that it's just getting darker and it doesn't look like the outside's charred like at all it looks like it's just evenly getting darker but it doesn't look burnt it just looks dark how much time do we have uh we're about 8 minutes so according to this still got a bunch of time oh my God they got all stuck together is that good or bad maybe knock a few off I think if you turn turn it off and on it goes the other way no we're

getting to like the two like the 12 sorry like the 12 13 minute territory looks like it's it looks like it's really yellow in there too and you see like yellow liquid on yeah what is that something definitely sounds like they're cracking yeah they're cracking do you hear that you hear that noise it's not just them falling no try lifting this slightly yeah oh no they're crackling like crazy are they yeah listen they're all burned they're burned same problem what you hear them crackling ehh or maybe not no so they're all just burnt to hell

again really [Music] why is this not working I just do not understand why it's burning so easily are these just weird coffees that that need like way lower temperatures or something maybe they're so full of sugar that they just burn easily we'll have to think about this we have only like maybe one chance left ah we spent the last hour doing a lot of research and the conclusion that I came up with is that I just suck okay but actually in our research we actually discovered a lot of things the most notable ones being that

apparently gisha coffee beans are pretty notoriously difficult to roast because you have to be very careful with them and have a strong tendency to Scorch and burn on the outside also honey processed beans are also hard to roast so both of those factors Together made this a very bad decision to try as my very first roasting experience thankfully though we still have our good stuff and I think we came up with a method that's going to work and uh to do this method we'll have to go to the other room okay so our secret to

the perfect roast is this air fryer and as far as I know there aren't many people roasting coffee in an air fryer but either way we've come up with our own madeup temperature profile and ramping it's based on nothing but I believe it'll work and we'll start the temperature at 300 fah and I'll let it preheat for about I don't know 3 minutes so we'll come back when it's at uh the 12 minute Mark now we can load all of our coffee beans in and I'm just going to do them all you know what at

this point I'm fed up if this doesn't work my coffee roasting career is officially done I quit all loaded up shake it around loaded it so we're going to leave it at this temperature just preheating for 4 minutes so now we're at the exactly at the point that we want to be at so I'll take the temperature here 325 activate now I'm going to keep this for another minute and a half or so and then raise it to 375 and keep it there for 2 minutes to probably make sure that it isn't burning okay no

no sign of burning yet no sign of burning no sign of coffee smell either but at least no Burning uh okay so let's it's been 2 minutes we raise it to 375 [Music] they're getting dark yeah they're getting dark but they don't look burned yet they yet okay now we'll crank it up to 400 okay 400 oh look smoke is coming [Music] out oh my gosh holy [Music] oh my god oh I hear pops yeah I think I heard a crack there's our first crack I heard a crack there's our first crack it's developing now

the flavor is developing okay it's almost hitting the 130 Mark done they're really dark I mean they don't look super burnt but here going to put them in this cuz the idea now is we want to cool it down quickly they have more density for sure than the charred mess we made before these look better these look much better I mean there's definitely a Char on the outside but you can see the bean itself doesn't look burnt we'll have to do something about the Char though maybe we could just rub the jar off a bit

yeah that's what I'm kind of thinking going to try to just pick up some and rub my hands together it's just raining burnt I should also say we're clearly doing something wrong here and I profusely apologize to any coffee Enthusiast also I still think we can get more Char off this is not the best method I think that like putting it in a rock tumbler I think that would actually fully remove it oh those actually look way better yeah they're they're brown that smells it smells good that smells like coffee it even looks like coffee

I think that's it it looks so much better and it looks like a solid light roast in my very very experienced opinion and I'm very happy with that so now I'll put everything into a much smaller little jar be careful not to lose any okay and I'll cover the top but I'll only cover the top very Loosely cuz apparently as it sits there some CO2 from The Roasting process should continue to escape from the beans and from what I read it just has to now sit here for at least 24 hours for that CO2 to

leave people also claim that this develops the flavor but I I don't know we have coffee and just dump them out here wow oh yeah those are some nice beans I'm just going to grab one no that's coffee um what I do really like no plantin that tells me we roasted it enough and also it's not burnt that means we didn't roast it too much I don't think we could have done better but either way we did all that work to get this and that was the hard part but now we need to actually turn

this into coffee I mean it is coffee but the drink it's coffee ooh this is going to be a dark cup of coffee okay just have to wait now and all of our beautiful coffee should just drip through and that's it this is it this is what over a week of work was for let's get to business I that looks good so time to see if it was all worth it h i like it I'm in this is great it's also not too bitter it's pretty mild and it has an interesting nice flavor it's one

of the best coffees I've ever had wow but I also might just be convincing myself of that uh to justify everything we've gone through you want to try some yeah let's go I'll pour you your own cup here well that's hot that's a hot cup let's try it h that's really good that is really good how do you rate it on 10 I've had some pretty good cup of coffees so yeah this I'd probably have to give this like a 7.5 on 10 but the fact that this was made from the ground up from scratch

from the Cherry all the way to this bumps it up another point so 8.5 on 10 because of all the work that was put into to creating this we did it yeah success let's go I think what we have to do though as a a final thing you know we can't let this coffee go to waste take your cup we need to cheers and finish it all okay so in the end I'm genuinely surprised that we were actually able to make something drinkable and my opinion might be a bit biased but I do think that

it was one of the best coffees I've ever had with that being said though I definitely learned a lot about making coffee and I hope that you learn something too but if you didn't this is yet again another perfect opportunity to mention the sponsor of this video brilliant if you haven't already heard of brilliant it's a learning platform with tons of lessons and things like math data science and computer science and I think it's one of the best ways to learn something new this is because not only are all of their lessons super concise fun

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