Smoked Coffee

[coffeeteaguy]

I work for a craft coffee roaster and we sell smoked coffee!  I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post the name of our business, but we small batch roast coffee, blend, and flavor and sell exclusively online to both retail and wholesale customers.

We roast our coffee first, then send it to our neighbors who have a smoked foods business.  The end result is extremely unique and pretty freaking amazing.  Literally nothing goes better after a day of grilling and bbq-ing then a hot cup of smoked coffee.

We also have a Maple Bacon flavored smoked coffee that is one of our top sellers.  

I recommend trying to smoke some coffee, but i would definitely use beans that have already been roasted.  We use a special blend of light and medium roast Costa Rican but I would say choose any coffee you love.  

(we've also experimented with smoked teas, if anyone is a tea drinker)

 

[bear55]

I never smoke my coffee beans inside.  The roaster I have will do about 8 oz of beans at a time and even when done right sets off the smoke detector.

 

[tamarockstar88]

A chef I work with recently went to Texas and visited some BBQ joints. She tried mesquite smoked coffee and said it was so good she's considering going back to Texas just for the coffee. I mentioned this to someone else I work with who does a lot of smoking and he said that he's tried it before and it's really good. I just don't know how to achieve it. He said that it's really good to drink, or you can grind it up and add it to chocolate, or butter and make a paste with it. My thoughts were also making coffee rubs or a wet rub with the beans. I have several recipes for coffee rubs for beef.

I'm definitely going to look into this some more and try to figure it out. I'll try either cold smoking some beans, or getting a light roast and doing a brief smoke. apparently 1 hour was too long so maybe start with a half hour and see how it goes. I'll update if I'm successful

 

[cayucosguy2]

I have never smoked Coffee Beans, I have smoked almost everything else. Would you use a generic coffee bean and smoke for 30 minutes?:welcome1::welcome1: thanks Tom

 

[leah elisheva]

Wow! I'm drinking my 16 ounce mug of Starbucks' "Guatemala-Antigua beans, black, and would love to hear how your smoked coffee episodes go! Very interesting!!!! Cheers to today!!! It's a lucky day, I have a hunch... - Leah

 

[mdboatbum]

Amazing, this thread is 3 years old and no one's really given a step by step on how to, or not to, do this. I'd think if you took a pound or so of already roasted beans and put them on a mesh mat or in a strainer that would allow the smoke to circulate and cold smoked them for a few hours you might be able to coat them with enough smoke to provide a smoke flavor. There is a smoked tea that I've loved for years. I believe it's called something like Lapsang Suoshong, but that spelling is almost definitely wrong. The wonderful thing about it is that it tastes like a nice strong black tea, but with a background flavor of a wood fire. It's like drinking tea around a campfire. The flavor of the tea isn't altered, it's just that the smoke flavor is an addition to it. I may try here in the next few days and see what I can come up with.

 

[stone brewed co]

We smoke our coffee.  So far we seem to be the only one's to do a genuine smoked coffee bean and it is glorious.  Check it out at www.stonebrewedcoffee.com

 

[leah elisheva]

How wild! (On the smoked coffee)! That's very exciting!!!!!!! Cheers! - Leah

 

[ratman56]

Hey all, I've read theses forums a lot and never joined in.  A lot of posts have been very helpful with other projects.  I've been smoking for 4-5 years now.  My specialty is smoking homemade meatballs.

I tried coffee today.  So here is what I did.  Electric Smoker set to 120 with a tray of ice above heat source (kind of a hybrid cold smoke).  Smoked for 1 hour with a mix of apple and mesquite.  The beans were barely warm at the end.  I smoked roasted, and green beans at the same time.  I still have yet to roast the green, but the pre-roasted beans took the smoke really well.  Ground some up and brewed them in an Aeropress.  Yum! Very different cup of coffee and I loved it.

photo (10).JPG

• ratman56
• Dec 23, 2013

 

[leah elisheva]

That's so exciting!!! It sounds wonderful! Cheers! - Leah

 

[dandl93]

Ratman56 

How did your green coffee beans smoke up did you ever toast them? I have used coffee trees for grilling beef and pork usally mixed with orange or guayba wood.I have plenty of green coffee beans avaiable on a full year time basis.When I get my smoker up and running this will be some thing I need to play with

Thanks 

Dan

 

[GaryHibbert]

sound  great. but how do you get the beans to cool rapidly??

gary

 

[thedjbooth]

I have smoked loose leaf tea as well. It turns out pretty good and is completely different than Lapsang Souchong which is smoked in the drying process.  I will have to try coffee. I wonder if the flavor will be more pronounced if you smoke the beans ground rather than whole?

 

[sigmo]

I have to think that the way to do this is just buy already roasted beans or roast your own (if you're set up to do it), cool them as per normal practice, and only then do the smoking.

In my mind, this would be a cold smoking procedure on the already-roasted beans so that you're not affecting the roast of the beans at all. You're just trying to deposit a layer of smoke onto the outsides of the beans so that when you grind and brew them, you get some smoke flavor in the final brew.

I'd just do a cold smoke, the same way I do cheese or butter, with the beans arranged the same way I do for nuts. Either on screens or pans with zillions of little holes so the smoke can get at them all.

All of the hand wringing about wrecking the beans by smoking them assumes that people are going to heat them up to some high temperature when smoking them. There's no need for that. Things smoke just great cold, or else we wouldn't have smoked cheeses and the like.

You just need a smoke generator that doesn't create a lot of heat. But again, that's what we all have to use when doing cheese, hard boiled eggs, butter, etc.

As for smoking the green beans before roasting: I don't think that would work as well. My feeling is that at the high temperatures used to actually roast beans, you might drive off the flavor components that you're looking to get from the smoking, or worse, cause them to break down into nasty-tasting compounds.

My sense is that when we smoke meat, even if the smoker is running at a high temperature so that it's cooking the food while it smokes it, the food itself is never at such high surface temperatures as you'd encounter when roasting coffee beans. So the smoke deposits or condenses on the surface of our food, and remains there and doesn't break down. But at the high coffee roasting temperatures, it might be driven off or converted into bad tasting compounds.

So again, I'd imagine that it would be best to cold smoke or at most warm smoke the already-roasted coffee beans. I've got to try this, by the way! :biggrin:

 

[james hackworth]

Did you cold smoke it?

 

[Worker62]

Today I tried smoking some coffee in the smoker. I was very pleased with the results! I took a dark roast and measured out the amount I was going to use to make a batch of coffee, the smoker was in the cooling down stage, I put the grounds in a small tin and the coolest side of the smoker. I added just enough apple wood to get some smoke infusion and let it infuse for about 10-15 minutes, then brewed the coffee right away using a pour over strainer. It turned out favorably. I’m no barista, but as long as you aren’t roasting the coffee beans, but using cool infusion, keeping it subtle and using decent coffee, the results are good. Cheap coffee may not work as well because you have an inferior base to work with. Like using margarine instead of butter. Ew! But I am a bit of a coffee “snob”.

 

[Worker62]

I have to think that the way to do this is just buy already roasted beans or roast your own (if you're set up to do it), cool them as per normal practice, and only then do the smoking.

In my mind, this would be a cold smoking procedure on the already-roasted beans so that you're not affecting the roast of the beans at all. You're just trying to deposit a layer of smoke onto the outsides of the beans so that when you grind and brew them, you get some smoke flavor in the final brew.

I'd just do a cold smoke, the same way I do cheese or butter, with the beans arranged the same way I do for nuts. Either on screens or pans with zillions of little holes so the smoke can get at them all.

All of the hand wringing about wrecking the beans by smoking them assumes that people are going to heat them up to some high temperature when smoking them. There's no need for that. Things smoke just great cold, or else we wouldn't have smoked cheeses and the like.

You just need a smoke generator that doesn't create a lot of heat. But again, that's what we all have to use when doing cheese, hard boiled eggs, butter, etc.

As for smoking the green beans before roasting: I don't think that would work as well. My feeling is that at the high temperatures used to actually roast beans, you might drive off the flavor components that you're looking to get from the smoking, or worse, cause them to break down into nasty-tasting compounds.

My sense is that when we smoke meat, even if the smoker is running at a high temperature so that it's cooking the food while it smokes it, the food itself is never at such high surface temperatures as you'd encounter when roasting coffee beans. So the smoke deposits or condenses on the surface of our food, and remains there and doesn't break down. But at the high coffee roasting temperatures, it might be driven off or converted into bad tasting compounds.

So again, I'd imagine that it would be best to cold smoke or at most warm smoke the already-roasted coffee beans. I've got to try this, by the way! :biggrin:

Absolutely Amazing with cool infusion of already roasted coffee.

 

[sigmo]

I had forgotten about this thread, and never got around to trying it myself!

Once the rain and snow subside, and I get the smoker going, I've got to actually try it.

 

[Worker62]

I had forgotten about this thread, and never got around to trying it myself!

Once the rain and snow subside, and I get the smoker going, I've got to actually try it.

I think the biggest key is infusion rather than roasting outright. One person said they smoked some for an hour with really bad results. Probably over cooked. Made more today and my son really liked it as well. Today I made it two chambers away from the fire chamber, everything closed up and I got a satisfactory amount of smoke without compromising the coffee beans. I actually used ground coffee in a loaf pan, this time about 15-20 minutes, longer only because it was much farther from the heat. And agitated the grounds a couple of times, mainly to make sure it wasn’t heating up too much. Second success. An hour though? I can imagine it may have tasted like brewed ashes. Hope you have the same success. Smoke coffee for me ranks up there with my favorite Smoked Porter.