My name is Asher Yaron, and I am currently in Ubud, Bali. My coffee process has been involved with coffee for 12 years. My coffee process is best described in three words: roast, grind, and brew. It is not even my own process; it is something that I copied from the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, which has been around for well over a thousand years.
This ceremony was first used where coffee was discovered: Ethiopia. The people who continue to do this ceremony today were the monks—the holy men—who were getting high off of what they were brewing. This coffee, this miraculous psychoactive substance, was ingested for the very first time, giving them a higher state of consciousness, awareness, and a sense of elevation.
I wanted to experience that same feeling. I asked, “How do we do this?” The answer is still grind and brew, but in Ethiopia, it takes hours to go through this ceremony every time. I always had the thought: How can I do this same process, but collapse the time? Can I do it in my home, in my own kitchen, in minutes rather than hours?
That is what inspired me to create my home roaster, called the Power Roaster. It roasts 120 grams—about 12 shots of espresso—in only six minutes, followed by two extra hours for cooling. In just eight minutes, I can roast coffee, a process that would take maybe an hour in the traditional Ethiopian ceremony.
With today’s grinders and modern technology, it is very easy to grind fresh-roasted coffee immediately. When you do this, your senses come into play because you experience the most exquisite aroma you have ever felt. The fresh roast and immediate grind are indicators that making coffee this way literally creates the best coffee. It can elevate anyone’s coffee experience. We are always looking for how to have a better cup of coffee, and lately, I have focused on the final step: the brewing process.
For this, I have acquired a manual espresso machine. Using a levered espresso machine, I can make the most amazing espresso in my kitchen at home. It is designed to make espresso as good as a multi-thousand-dollar machine, which is something I cannot afford and I think most people cannot afford. Moreover, I wanted something more green and sustainable. This manual machine makes the most exquisite cup of coffee.
Now, I can be in my kitchen, perform the roast, grind, and brew process, and it takes me about 10 to 12 minutes to do the whole thing. Then, I can sit with my coffee, meditate like the monks in Ethiopia, and get high, enlightened, and expand my awareness and consciousness through this sacred substance called Arabica coffee.
The part of the coffee process I am most passionate about is taking the green coffee—the coffee cherry seeds—and roasting them. The result is what we can now grind and brew. I am most passionate about this because the process is simply magical. There is really nothing you can do with a hard green bean; you can’t even plant it as a seed because the outer covering is already taken off. The only thing you can do with it is roast it until it looks like this.
This roasted bean has a lot of potential. What we can do with it is grind and brew it, creating an extraction that we can drink and take into our bodies. When done with fresh roast, this affects our brains and bodies in very positive ways.
What I want to do is go through the process with my Power Roaster and show you exactly how we do the roast, grind, and brew process. By doing so, we collapse that hour-long Ethiopian coffee ceremony into a minutes-long process that you can do in your own kitchen.
