Like a finely brewed macchiato, roasting your own coffee beans is a layered affair. Standing at the bench of a makeshift mud-brick hut deep in northern Thailand’s fertile forests, coffee farmer Lo-Ue Jayo is about to guide me through my first coffee-making lesson using a 72-year-old Probatino roaster.
“You don’t need books to learn how to make good coffee,” says Lo-Ue encouragingly, his hazel eyes watching me intently as I crank the roaster by hand. “We learn how to roast by using all the senses: looking, listening, smelling. It’s like cooking.” Slowly and evenly, I turn the roaster’s handle to rotate the beans. I’m quickly greeted by a faint nutty aroma, which grows more robust as the beans churn inside the drum. Wispy white smoke begins to curl from the roaster’s small opening, followed by a popping sound that signals the beans are starting to caramelise.
When the popping stops, Lo-Ue’s broad, toothy smile appears and he nods with approval. Roasting is an artform, he tells me — one
