Roasting at Fiori Coffee

Fiori Coffee Roasters in West Perth feels like my second home this week. In part because I seem to have spent so much time there, but also because Kamran, Louise and Justin have made me feel so welcome.

Monday afternoon was the big coffee roast for my 'Coffee for a Cause' Fundraiser for the Autism Association.

The idea such as it was, was going to be just me buying 10 kilos of green beans, roasting them at home in my 'corretto' home made roaster then selling them for whatever we could get - I figured each little bit would help.

Some months and 75 kilos of donated green beans later I now have a little more insight into this coffee roasting game - and a lot more respect for the master artisan roasters (as opposed to roasters who are more commercially oriented).

My fellow coffee snobs added 30 kilos of a superb Zambian coffee to the 10 kilos I had amassed, then a little while later, MatthewG, also a CoffeeSnob sent me 20 kilos of his personal stash of green beans. This gave me a starting point of 60 kilos - 6 times my original plan, but even then on Monday, it became clear that the orders we had in hand would exceed this supply again and Kamran and Louise immediately donated another 28 kilos of coffee.

I am awed by the generosity of all those who contributed green beans, but he guys at Fiori Coffee really topped it off over the last few days with their contribution of time, expertise, espresso and a whole lot more coffee.

Monday afternoon started with figuring out just how much coffee we would need to meet the orders, then selecting the right mix for the blended coffees and separating those out from the Single Origin estate beans. Kamran selected the Barrios Estate Honduran coffee as the 'extra' for the roast and Justin prepped the big 30 kilo roaster.

I got to pour the first batch into the hopper but kept my hands off the roaster otherwise (did not want to bust it like I did the Synesso last month!).

By this time 'Tanghy' had arrived to lend a hand and we all sampled some of Kamran's outrageously good coffee.

Justin got the roasting underway and for the next couple of hours we cycled roast after roast through the big Deidrich that is the fiery centre of Fiori Coffee.

It took over 75 kilos of green beans to meet the orders we had received and I was looking at for barrels loaded with freshly roasted coffee and thinking that one more person would have been useful - and then he turned up! One thing I'll say about CoffeeSnobs and Chris in particular is that they have a great sense of timing. Under Kamran and Justin's direction we got to work weighing, grinding and bagging the beans. About 50% or orders specified ground coffee (shudder) but, I guess not everyone can be a coffee snob.

One really big order from an Italian family was 20 kilos - of beans (hooray!) so that order made things a little easier to work with. We got 75% of the job done Monday night and the rest over a couple of lunchtimes this week.

I reckon I have a few more things to say about the roast and the fundraiser in general, but they can wait till tomorrow. Right now I am flat on the bed in coffee roaster recovery mode and typing with a laptop balanced this way is not at all as easy as I had imagined it might be.

Thanks to all for the support of the fundraiser so far, especially Kamran, Louise and Justin from Fiori who this week showed great generosity and really took the project beyond my expectations.