Tour of Houston’s Amaya Roasting Company

A few weeks ago I hosted the @BeingHouston account on Twitter and ended up getting a tour of Amaya Roasting Company. I’ve been buying Amaya coffee beans for probably a year now and frequenting their coffee shop Catalina Coffee so I was stoked to see their bean roasting operation.

Amaya is located in the back of this building in East Downtown (EaDo) though the gallery is out of business:

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Here’s Max outside entrance to @AmayaRoastingCo. It’s their coffee at Hugos Houston, Backstreet Cafe, CatalinaCoffee and a lot of other local establishments:

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Green beans = unroasted coffee beans. They feed in 18 lbs into roaster, it comes out 15 lbs b/c water evaporation. The curve shows the temperature – time graph that they take the beans through when roasting them.

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Bean moisture is very important. Too much could lead to fungus. Too little isn’t good either. Moisture testing machine.

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They hand control temp over the 12-15 min it takes to roast a batch, but they log the actual temp curve in this software.

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Cupping setup Amaya Roasting Co. Same beans but roasted light vs normal to show the difference roasting makes on taste (I was short on time so we didn’t do an actual cupping)

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These decaf beans were roasted while I was at Amaya Roasting Co. The beans are being cooled off here:

This is @AmayaRoastingCo’s small batch roaster, made in USA. Same as big1 one but used test roast small batches.

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And this is the big roaster:

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Max doesn’t regularly give tours… Yet. They’re moving into a new space that’s a lot bigger in the next few months and when they do Max plans to do tours and cuppings on a regular basis.

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