Dieter01 wrote:Have you tried a more S-shaped BT curve on the Hottop? Drop in at high temp, slack off heat before the beans turn golden, low RoR though 1C and then ramping the temp back up again for the finish?

(Sorry for the delay, I only roast once a week)

Did you mean S-shaped ET?

I did try a high drop in temp with a slower RoR and a slow finish, but I didn't like the result.
Tried again yesterday, this time with a ramp up at the end of 1C for a fast finish. Total roast was faster than I'd have hoped, and the beans haven't yet rested 24 hours, so its premature for me to former an opinion quite yet. Is this along the lines of what you meant?

Yes, thats along those lines. You might have to stretch the time between when the beans turn golden (~ 150*C / 300*F) and first crack (~ 194*C / 381*F for me) with another minute to allow proper development during this middle phase though. Is that possible with the Hottop without lowering the drop-in temperature too much?

Forgot to mention the specifics, which should help translate my BT numbers to everyone else's:
drop in 350BT/437ET. 1C at 7:00 345BT/408ET. Eject at 10:00 360BT/430ET.

Dieter01 wrote:You might have to stretch the time between when the beans turn golden (~ 150*C / 300*F) and first crack (~ 194*C / 381*F for me) with another minute to allow proper development during this middle phase though. Is that possible with the Hottop without lowering the drop-in temperature too much?

Ya, the Hottop should be able to do that. I underestimated how much residual heat there was with such a high drop in temperature, and was too slow to correct it by lowering the heat much earlier. I could have slowed things down much more abruptly half way through the roast when I realized this by lifting out the rear filter, but have never been happy with the results when doing that in the past. Maybe such abrupt temperature drops mid roast are detrimental somehow.

So, I'm culling info from here as well. Mine must be a sister bean of sorts, so I'm hoping for somewhat similar conclusions. It might be completely subjective, but it seems like most are favoring a 200 drop in BT, rather than a 220, with a bit more dwell time in the dry down phase. The S curve just got flipped.

I know these are separate beans, and I'm hoping between threads, I just don't want to end up with mouth puckering lemon acidity and cranberry tartness. with no body A bit of kick in the teeth is ok, as long as there's some balance.

This may sound like a dumb question, but do you guys ever find a consensus as to which temperature value to track in, Ferenheit vs Celcius? I think I'm going to just stick with C, for some reason, my mind is grasping that better, but if I see more and more charts that tabulate Ferenheit data, I'm going to have to break out my calculator just to read thru the posts

rama wrote:Maybe such abrupt temperature drops mid roast are detrimental somehow.

Thats something I've been wondering about myself. We do it in order to achieve a certain RoR, but is it detrimental when the changes are too abrubt? I tried doing some test batches related to this a while back but I can't say I was able to isolate abrubt changes as a variable. It was difficult to keep other parameters similar (length & degree of roast, time until 1C etc).