No audible first crack with Yemen Mokha Ismaili

[DavidMLewis]

I had what for me was a unique experience recently, roasting the Yemen Mokha Ismaili from the Green Coffee Co-op. I've been experimenting with trying to get as much energy as I can into the beans at the beginning of first crack or just before. Accordingly, I programmed the Hottop to keep the heater on from a bean temperature of 396° to 414°. I'm inclined to believe that in the Hottop, a lot of the energy picked up by the beans is from radiative transfer, unlike a traditional drum roaster; it seems to me that whether the heater is on or not has much more effect than the environment temperature does. That makes some sense given the perforated drum.

The good news is that the results of this roast taste incredible. At higher doses and ristretto shots, it's like biting into a bittersweet chocolate bar. At lower doses and normale shots, it's full of wine and flowers with a back of cocoa. In other words, it's everything I hope the bean to be. The weird news is that there's no audible first crack at all, and not a whole lot of bean expansion. I'm inserting the roast log below, where you can see that it's going at about 20°/min through what would normally be first crack. It also doesn't smell much at all for about two days, and then it smells great.

I'm sort of reluctant to mess with something that tastes so good; my desire for knowledge is fighting with my desire for great-tasting coffee. I sure would like to understand this better, though.

David

[another_jim]

I bought a bunch of this too, and my air roast 1st was also anemic. I sped up the roast by two minutes, one off the warm up, and one off the final ramp from the start of the first to the end of the roast. It has made the sounds more conventional, but hasn't affected the taste. I'm thinking it's an ultra-classic Yemen, so internally variable that no amount of external variation is going to affect it in the least.