Q: I am looking for some green beans to roast at home, but mostly for making green coffee extract drinks. Good sencha is my thing, but in the kitchen I focus on nutrition and qualities that help those struggling with illness. A light Google search indicates Robusta is the bean to use for green extract, and I suppose it will roast as well. I only see one Robusta on your site, from India. Do you have any others I am not finding? Or additional info I should consider? I’ve extracted pre-roasted but never green.
A: Robusta is generally not the kind of coffee you’d drink a cup of. It’s best thought of as a condiment to steer things somewhere. it IS full of caffiene however, so depending on who wrote that about coffee extracts, they may have had a completely different idea about what Robusta is about. Robusta is also generally the least expensive out there, so that may have been a factor too.
Processing and origin make a huge difference in the taste of coffee, even before how you roast it makes it’s own huge difference. So I’d suggest getting some small amounts of a few kinds of beans to see the wide range of what’s out there.
Normally I’d point you to a sampler if you were only roasting, but if you let me know what you want to spend, I’ll put together a range of beans you can try as extracts to see what range of tastes you get.
How much is needed to do an extract experiment?
Q: the ingredient we are focused on seems to be chlorogenic acid or GCA. At least 45%. Given that everyone with an internet connection is an expert these days, it could well be the poster don’t know nuthin. Could also be that Robusta does have a more extractable amount, I dunno. At any rate, the basic recipe I’m finding is ~2/oz green bean > 12/oz water, boiled 10-20 minutes, and steeped till you remember to stop steeping it… Doses at 1/oz several times a day.
My focus is on green, but thanks for the tip on Robusta, doesn’t sound like the one for roasting. I’m going to experiment with cold water extraction, as anything green looses much benefit with heat. Spending $25?
A: The description sound just like what I’ve read. Boil the heck out of them, drink the water. Different kinds of coffee will have a different taste.
I do know the beans get soft again especially after steeping like that. You may even see a sprout. The only few times I’ve tried the process my first thought was to blend the soft beans into slush and then use a centrifuge type device to get everything out of them. Even more than what leeches out like a tea. (An apple press might have the same result.)
Just don’t try to grind up dry hard beans! You’ll kill your grinder. I’ve done it with an industrial grinder as an experiment, but it’s not practical. If you are business minded though I bet you could cold steep the beans, grind them into a paste, re- dry the paste into powder and sell raw coffee powder as 100% raw coffee. (maybe?)
If you’d like I can send a Paypal request for $25. about 6 of that will be shipping, the rest will be random samples of different coffees that would give you an idea of processing and origin differences.
Q: You have hit a sweet spot with the note on sprouting. There is nothing more amazing in my experience of ‘repairative food’ than a sprouting seed. I’m not a cheerleader about it but the transition phase between dormancy and active, call it the shoot phase, is nothing more than miraculous. I shun processed and supplement type offerings for this reason. I’ll need to get assured that coffee does not amplify ‘don’t eat me’ toxicity in the sprouting phase, but it seems any protective quality a seed may have is quickly transformed into raw living energy seeking light and growth. this adds a whole new dimension to the project.
I’ll need to find what the traditional cultures of coffee have discovered and brought into their folk-practices, and expect to find green coffee, softened and sprouted from fresh. or at least active sprouting beans. will take a top notch. the paste idea is a good one at this stage. researching on the internet requires a stroll through the minefield of make a buck huksterism so thanks much for your candid discussion. which is rare indeed.
Please send a Paypal request for $30 (I’m living a little!) and at your convenience assemble a package that meets the spirit of our notes. Please see that around 1/3 is of finest grade for roasting and enjoying the best of the drink, even if it’s a few beans, then the remainder a collection of organic, green, with the most potential for successful sprouting. some I will use as hot extraction, most I will try to cold extract and spout. please provide a bit of Robusta so I can try that out as a blending item. from my resulting notes I’ll order selections next month.
thanks again, this is all pretty cool.
A: Will do. Also you may want to look into Qishr. It’s the husks of coffee left over from the parchment stage. Brewed into tea. Nasty without caradmom and other things. This is something that comes up on my radar sometimes, but having drunk it, not something I added to the website. Gotta buy like 50 pounds at a time brought in from Yemen. Imagine the size of a pile of what 50 pounds of feathers might look like. Crushed up, not so bad. but still a big box.
Also Kati, made from the leaves themselves. Horrible like lawn clippings.
http://67.22.130.146/blog/?p=195
BTW… Ethiopians used to travel with a combination of coffee fruit (sans beans) and fat. Balled up like meat balls and used for snacking on long trips.
Oh and sprouting a seedling from processed coffee is harder than it sounds.
Coffee sprouts for eating are unfortunately bound to be disappointing. Boiling the seeds may force the endosperm out (the little tail, I think that’s the word for it) but kill any life left in them too. Coffee for export is usually only at about 11% moisture content. For viability, coffee needs to be at about 18%. Having said that though, life tends to hang on, so there is always the chance that a beans for export could sprout for real. Especially if you plant enough of them.
Bad news too is that spouting for real can take up to three months given the moisture content and the hard life they’ve already had. So the chances of rotting in the ground is high, or nothing happens at all. And the only way to check is digging them up.
My experience with sprouting Robusta is that they do in fact tend to live longer and sprout, but then the tail breaks off and they die anyway. I’m not a botonist so its a mystery. I have grown many many thousands of Arabica seedlings though. It’s mostly a lot of work if you don’t live at 3000 feet at the equator. In my case Southern CA was close enough though, for coffee trees as houseplants.
More bad news. Coffee under the best conditions can take 3-4-5 years to begin producing fruit. At home though they do make beautiful house plants though. Especially bunched up. Separately they tend to be a little leggy, and shaped like an upside down charlie brown christmas tree.
Eating them, if you get that far, won’t harm you in any way. Caffeine is a natural bug repellant, so in that sense you’d be eating natures own 
For example, coffee grounds are one way to control ants. They won’t cross a line of coffee grounds.
If you have a green house that might be the best bet for sprouting and growing. Coffee trees live in volcanic climates, so offer them lots and lots of drainage as you’d get in lava rock fed by composting vegetation.
Q: Thank you. I actually found a coffee plant in our small grocery here once, cool beans thought I.
After two years of nursing and fussing, I had an eternal shoot at the top and two leaves, apparently awaiting a trip to Colombia. Finally tossed it when I moved to a new apartment. As to sprouting, I’m not so much looking to plant and grow them, but to try and sprout them much like any other bean; soak 24 hours, then drain and rinse twice a day. tropical seeds get put in my kombucha warming box, and so far pretty much anything that hasn’t been frankenstiened by monsanto takes right off….brown rice, garbonzos, pinto, popcorn, etc. Never tried coffee though, so I’ll let you know how that goes with a dozen or so beans. The wheat berries I grind for bread take right off, even after years of storage. Now somethings like whole oat groats are typically hulled, read as killed, so they won’t sprout. In these cases one must hunt for hull-less oat groats of the natural variety; which will change the way one feels about real oatmeal forever and a day.
Thanks again for this great info. I’ve decided to give up sencha and play with your coffees a while. My last journey was with Blue Mountain and Kona, and worth the pennies at the time, but companies such as The Coffee Project didn’t exist and I’m sure great coffee hand roasted is much more affordable, and probably better than roasted and warehoused.