Coffee Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people interested in all aspects of producing and consuming coffee. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Is it possible to grind green coffee beans, then roast the grinds, and make a good cup of coffee with the result? Are there reasons why doing so would be impossible or impractical or would necessarily result in a bad cup of coffee? Has it ever been tried?
This is entirely a curiosity of mine, but I could imagine some benefits of making coffee in this way. For example, the roasting time may be much faster than traditional roasting, perhaps making the process of home-roasting more appealing.
No. Unroasted coffee beans are denser and wetter than roasted beans and will not grind well. You will break your grinder trying, and even if the grinder succeeded, you'd get more of a mush than solid grinds.
Also, roasting ground green coffee would allow much more of the oils and gasses trapped in the coffee to leak out during roasting than even the driest roast. The resulting coffee would taste strange.
Roasted coffee loses flavor quickly after grinding due to oxidation and the release of CO2, related to the bigger surface area created by grinding. I'd think that effect would be magnitudes larger if you'd roast ground coffee.
Now imagine the coffee being roasted with the huge surface area after grinding. Now, that's a bit speculative, but even if the coffee doesn't start burning during the roasting process, I imagine the result will be close to charcoal.
