Inside a Coffee Roastery in Dubai: What It Takes to Make Coffee Truly Specialty

For most coffee drinkers, coffee is the last in a long chain of interactions – a bag on a shelf, a cup at the counter. The events that occurred prior to that time are seldom seen. For a specialty coffee roastery, however, the process starts months before the first bean has been roasted.

Blacksmith's Dubai roastery turns Ethiopian, Colombian, Brazilian and Rwandian green beans into your favorite coffee. Once you understand the secret behind the process, you will value each sip more deeply.

Step 1: It starts with sourcing, not roasting

The most significant decisions in specialty coffee are made at origin, before the coffee ever reaches a roastery in Dubai, or anywhere else. All of these factors – where a bean is grown, what altitude, how it is processed, by what farmer – will affect the flavour potential of a bean. At the end of the day, a roaster is only as good as the raw material they work with.

Blacksmith sources directly from the producers, establishing trade relationships with those who are able to provide documentation of their practices, and consistently grow a coffee that scores above 80 on the Specialty Coffee Association scale. It's not common with commodity coffee, as beans are generally sold via brokers and there is no transparency with regards to origin.

When green beans arrive at our Dubai roastery, they've already been cupped, tasted and evaluated, at origin and again on arrival. The batches that do not qualify for the standards are not produced.

Step 2: The green bean, the raw material, not the finished product

In its raw form, a green coffee bean is unrecognizable compared to the coffee you know. It is rather dense, slightly waxy and with a grassy or almost herbal fragrance. There's no flavour you know of–the chocolate, fruit, the caramel f lavor–they simply don’t exist yet. Every single one of those signature notes must be meticulously developed by heat.

Green beans are also extremely stable. Stored correctly in a cool, dry environment, they can maintain quality for up to two years. This is why a roastery can plan ahead, buying exceptional lots when they become available and storing them until they're needed for production.

Step 3: Roasting, the science and craft come together

Roasting causes a series of physical and chemical changes in the green bean. The process typically takes 10 to 15 minutes, but every second matters. While the roasting cycle generally lasts between ten and fifteen minutes, the precision of every passing second is critical to the final profile. Roasters monitor temperature curves and how fast the bean heats up, when it reaches important development points, and when to add/remove heat.

The things Dubai roasteries have to consider that other roasteries don't.

There are some variables introduced by roasting in UAE that are not seen in roasters in cooler areas. The ambient temperature in Dubai, particularly during the summer, has an impact on how fast the beans heat up and how the air flows within the drum. Moisture content in the drying phase is also affected by humidity, which is generally under control indoors.

At Blacksmith, our roasters tweak profiles according to the season - the same bean can taste different in July than it does in January, so a different profile will be used during those months. It's one of the things which sets a serious specialty coffee roastery apart from a coffee roastery that follows just a set programme throughout the year.

Step 4: Resting, the part most people don't know about

Coffee is not ready to drink after it is roasted. Beans emit a great deal of carbon dioxide after roasting, a process known as degassing. An unbalanced, gassy brew will result from brewing before this point. Extraction of CO₂ is not uniform, resulting in channeling and inconsistency.

Espresso roasts require 7 to 14 days of rest to achieve the best flavour. 5 to 10 days are the optimum time for filtering roasts. This is why specialty coffee bags have one-way valves, as it allows the release of CO₂ without allowing oxygen to penetrate the bag during this “rest” time.

Step 5: Quality control, packaging, and dispatch

Each batch is cupped and assessed against the desired roast profile by the roasting team before it is shipped out of the roastery. All four parameters: temperature, grind, extraction time, and sensory notes, are recorded. Held and reviewed batches are those that do not meet the profile.

To keep the beans fresh, they are stored in bags which are flushed with nitrogen and have one-way valves. All bags include a roast date and country or origin details, processing details, and tasting notes, not as marketing text, but as a log of the roaster's tasting notes when creating the profile.

From here, orders are sent all over the UAE, to homes, cafés, and wholesale partners in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. We measure the time from our roaster to your door in days, not months.

Why it's important as a coffee drinker

It's not necessary to understand the Maillard reaction to drink a great cup of coffee. Once you grasp what a specialty coffee roastery does, how the coffee is sourced, how the roastery precisely roasts the coffee, how much those beans are rested, etc., it is easier to understand why this coffee tastes the way it does, and why it tastes different from the coffee you find in a supermarket.

The difference between commodity coffee and specialty coffee is not marketing. It's the result of dozens of careful decisions made at every step of the way, from the farm to your cup.