My overall impressions about coffee:

I cupped 9 roasts at once. This proved difficult to keep things straight, deal with cooling coffee and handle the caffeine. I felt pretty confident to make some rankings and broader grouping characterization. I'd like to add that my wife and I generally agreed. This did not include any of Marcel's, since we were waiting for international packages.
We found the top four to be : TMB2, FO1, DM2 and DM1.
Some had a tomatoe-like flavor that I usually associate with Kenya coffee (FO1 and DM2).
RPB1, RPB2, AF12, and TMB1 were on the underdeveloped side.
CM1 was noticeably darker. The rest were all quite similar in roast level.
DM1, TMB1, RPB1 were noted as being flat.

The best ones to me had a very lively nature. I note this as "persistence" in flavor. The flavors stay on your pallet and develop long after the sip is gone. The flat ones, which I interpret as the "baked" term thrown around a lot, have a one dimensional, short lived, or non-existent liveliness.

I have to say, though. These rankings and observations are kind of splitting hairs. All of the coffee tasted similar. Afterall, the green and the roasters are identical. In light of this, I feel pretty confident that when I get 10lbs of greens, I can get pretty well dialed in to the coffee's potential on a Huky.

Lessons I learned:
1) Water is CRITICAL!! I cupped with rpavlis water (above) and noted differences in all the roasts. I repeated with the tap/distilled I have been using for the last two years. With the tap/distilled, all the coffee tasted flatter and identical. It was really eye-opening.
2) Green coffee quality is the biggest factor. We need to source good beans to have good coffee.
3) This excercise really made me dial in my process. Instead of falling back to an "omniroast", it is important to spend some time with a new bean. From now on, I'm going to focus on only buying 10lb bags. 5 of those will be for dialing in the roast 3 batches at a time.
4) I wonder if Rao killed this experiment. From the looks of the curves, we all subscribe to the ROR dogma. Does this make all our coffee taste the same?

I did find that there were not huge differences in flavors. All coffee's were tasty. I did like Ricks and Marcel's. I always wondered why my drop temp was higher than others. Obviously personnel taste preference is a big part but I wondered if it was differences in the RTD/TC probes. With this data I can say that my drop temp is higher than all others and that is reflected in my ground coffee color being darker. My thought is probes are not the key difference. Readings were taken grinding beans on an espresso grinder. Ranking chart below. A lot of variation in finish times and color although I would say mine is an outlier, LOL. Less variation in taste than I would have expected. However my taste buds are not great. Along with that I had to taste in 2 separate sessions as I was travelling so some coffees would have been tasted a month after roasting. Not ideal. Note: I use a drip -Hario for my daily drivers

Also noted the differences in charge weights. Rick and Dave what charge weight do you use?

Rick appreciate your comments about water. I need to get going on trying the rpavlis water,

This is wild. There doesn't seem to be any agreement on which roasts were the best!

I thought about it hard and long, but by the time the coffee arrived and I could cup it it was >4 weeks old, and past its prime.

I THINK that age muted lots of flavor so my grading, using the SCA cupping scorecard, is now pointless, also because there were a few boxes we could not tick. Initially I was planning to give like 4 out of 5 for those aspects not scored.

Last week I ran out of coffee, so I used the leftovers from the cupping exercise and I was quite puzzled by the distinct blueberry flavors that I like, and was able to bring out with my own roasts of this coffee but that were not present during cupping. What is happening when coffee ages?

I also think that the results were remarkably comparable.

My roasts were all with a 300g charge - I've found it gives lots of head room in power when the weather is cold.

I did forget to start artisan on my first roast, the start should be pretty much the same as the second.

@Chuck ; what is your FC temp, on my system that correlates usually quite good with what literature says, some deviations due to faster roasts put aside...I did not notice any difference in FC temp comparing TCs and RTDs when I changed, the RTDs are highly recommended as they make the difference between steering an oil tanker with an oar versus more nimble control on a speedboat.

Marcelnl wrote:@Chuck ; what is your FC temp, on my system that correlates usually quite good with what literature says, some deviations due to faster roasts put aside...I did not notice any difference in FC temp comparing TCs and RTDs when I changed, the RTDs are highly recommended as they make the difference between steering an oil tanker with an oar versus more nimble control on a speedboat.

Good point, I have mine autoset at 390. For the most part I see this as consistent +/- 3 deg. I missed too many times marking first crack, I still have coffee left and will verify on the next session

ShotClock wrote:My roasts were all with a 300g charge - I've found it gives lots of head room in power when the weather is cold.

I did forget to start artisan on my first roast, the start should be pretty much the same as the second.

It's interesting that I identified your roasts as the best. The real funny thing is that your ROR profile is the least Rao-esque. I'd like to make a claim here about batch size, but no one else picked your batches as #1, lol

Interesting - my gas adjustments are derived from Rao's default settings, while trying to slow the first part of the roast and maintain momentum to get to around 20F after FC. I think the curves look strange due to the combination of a smallish charge and low environmental temperature. My guess is that the initial peak in RoR comes from conduction, and once that effect runs out, i get a dip, then another peak from convection. Pie special, but this effect seems to be more pronounced with denser coffees. I've tried to smooth out the RoR, but haven't found any advantage in it. Slowing down the first part of the roast to limit harsh acidity seems to be the key for me, as I'm a bit overpowered, and a dense natural can take off really quickly.