I'm enjoying this bean quite a bit, however it has behaved differently in the roaster than any other bean I have tried so far. It seems to take a lot more heat to carry it through to 1C in ~10-11 minutes. And when it finishes, there's wild variance in bean color. Some beans appear to be nearly into 2C, and there's also a lot of very lightly colored beans that I assume are quakers. I cull most of the extremes, but even then the variance is noticeable. I don't see bean surface burning defects, which is somewhat surprising to me given how much heat I am applying.

As espresso, it has a tart cherry flavor muddied with chocolate and a fermented note. The fermented note becomes unpleasantly pronounced if I increase extraction by grinding finer and/or using >2:1. I'd like to bring out more of the cherry and whatever is under the chocolate/caramel flavors, which I assume is coming from the fact that some of my beans are significantly darker than others.

Grateful for any shared wisdom anyone has on how to get the most out of this bean.

https://www.coffeebeancorral.com/produc ... EDNAT.aspx

It sounds like a new take on a very old style of coffee prep. In Chiapas, Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, in the 1800s, coffee used to be done natural, then dried on roof tops. It didn't get to the roasters for about a year, and competed with similar naturals from Yemen and the Indonesian Islands. That was how coffee was prepped world wide before the washed process. There were growers, especially in Chiapas, who continued along these lines, as do the growers in Yemen.

While Yemen coffees are traditionally roasted light, these island coffees were traditionally roasted to the the beginning of the second crack (while "Javas" were roasted to a rolling second) . However, that applies to the Bourbon varietal, which usually has complex, chocolatey roast flavors, but only simple, malic origin flavors. I don't know enough about red caturras to say at what roast level they show their best.