Hi all
I am fortunate to live in an area with access to wild cacao, vanilla, loads of other plants and of course coffee beans. I have 5k Roaster and have some minimal experience experimenting with coffee flavouring. Does anyone here flavour coffee beans on a regular basis? I know in colombia they stick cinamon sticks into the coffee roasters and even lay the beans on floweres after roasting. I would like to achieve good tasting naturallly flavoured coffee with spices and herbs.

Thanks
Ash

In some other thread a while back we talked about putting pieces of wood from used bourbon barrels in the sealed greens bag for a couple months prior to roasting to take on that flavor. I never tried it, but maybe something like that would work.

I've seen roasters do US style flavored coffees. That is simply putting the roasted beans in a mixer (or stirring a pot) and adding flavoring syrups. Hispanic roasters add sugar and cinnamon with the green coffee into the roaster, darkening and flavoring the beans as they roast. I've heard some Italian roasters add wood chips, but I've never seen it (how do they remove them afterwards?). Letting green coffee sit in barrels used to age bourbon or beer has become more common. That's easy -- buy a barrel, and let the coffee sit in it for six months.

Barrel aging green coffees is interesting, and definitely adds some flavor. But after about a half dozen tries, I don't think it's a game changer, like with wine or whiskey. The other flavoring methods are for commodity coffees only.