Does anyone know the duty cycle Joe uses in his roasters? I believe that P1-P5 in manual mode works like this: Given that, if I knew the duty cycle I could switch between (for instance) P3 and P4 every duty cycle's length of time to get an effective 62.5%/37.5% cycle, allowing for finer control of the heater. In a perfect world he would have thought of this and allowed for pressing two buttons to run the heat at the mid-point, but that doesn't seem to be in there. I want to drop from 100% to 87.5% at start of yellow, then to 62.5% at start of first crack...

I timed it once upon a time with a stop watch, as I recall it's around 15 seconds. Listen carefully and you can hear the relay or run it with the door open and no drum and just watch. Every time you press a button it starts the pwm cycle with the element on so if that's what you want, the best solution would be to put a small lamp across the heater and then press the other button each time the light comes on.

Ira

I am thinking if I just press the next button each time the element lights it will finish the current cycle then start the new one. At least that will be what I try on the next roast I do. I believe the only scenario that would break it is if it starts the cycle with the new value immediately on button press, where I could end up with an effective P5. IIRC Joe said that wasn't the case however, which is why he said to press P1 then the selection you want in order to shut off after the current cycle before starting the new one.

To see how it works, press P2, figure out how long the off time is and then press P3 in the middle, if the element turns on immediately then pressing the button directly starts the next segment.

Ira

In my experience, pressing the button only goes to the new duty cycle when the current duty cycle is finished, my experience agrees with Joe Behm's advice. I still forward think my roasts a bit by planning ahead when pressing the buttons but I also have a variac which allows me to fine-tune the temps / profile.

I was unable to talk to Joe, but was led to understand the new connected one will have solid state controls for the element so any setting should be possible. List should be $599 and in order to get to the advanced user profiling stuff you'll need to be wifi connected and have signed away all you rights, i.e., you accept all liability for anything that happens during a roast. The part about wifi might not be correct, but when the wifi went down in their booth, they couldn't seem to demo the roaster.

Ira

I think you got the gist of it for the connected version of the roaster, but I think it'll be a bluetooth connection rather than WiFi. Joe talked about three modes for this roaster, beginner, profile (what we have today with the +) and manual and that you'd have to accept a liability waiver if you operated the roaster in manual mode. He also mentioned that the phone would be used as a sort of dead-man's switch so that if you walked away from the roaster or set the phone down and didn't move it for quite a while the roaster could tell that it was unattended.

OK, I roasted two batches of 12oz each of the Java Blawan from Happy Mug last Sunday. The first batch was roasted at P5 (100%) to start of yellow, dropped to P4/P5 (82.5%) until start of first crack, then dropped again to P3/P4 until cooling cycle. As always I ran the drum fast until start of first crack, then slowed the drum and changed to Rosetta Stone mode, starting cool at 30 second on the clock. I got a nice full city or FC+ and will use this for espresso. The second batch was more traditional, P5 to yellow, P4 to 1C, P3 to cool and everything else the same. The roast was a solid FC or very slightly lighter.

I was out of town over the week but able to get back for yesterday's morning coffee. The drip was quite nice, much better than I'd been getting with the Guatemala I was using before with both floral and fruit notes accessible. Note that I'm using a Cuisinart Burr Grind & Brew, so grind is far from ideal... I wasn't successful in pulling a good espresso shot through three grind revisions, moving from 2G to 2N still choked up. This morning I was finally able to pull a shot, with 2V! 2S was still too fine. Again, nice flavor, though slightly undeveloped due to a user tamp caused spritz late in the pull.

I'm loading 15g into my 51mm single wall basket with a naked portafilter on a Breville 800ESXL. No chance that heat will be consistent and I have to stop each shot a bit early to account for the continuing run you get on this machine. No three way value, so no vacuum when you stop means a very wet puck and 10 seconds or so of dribbles after you stop the shot. The best shots I pull seem to be 30-35g out at 25-30 seconds plus dribbles.

No conclusions yet, it'll take a bunch more roasts before I can say I have figured our how these temperature tweaks affect the Behmor.