Are today's small batch roasters too inconsistent? - Page 4

#31: Post by **another_jim** » August 30th, 2018, 1:39 pm

Almico wrote:Simply...no. Maybe on your roaster, but on mine I am well into 2C in 3:30min. I believe Rob Hoos is on to something with his theory that more early heat builds more pressure inside the bean. And things cook (develop) faster under pressure. I have a wonderful microlot Honduras. If I roast it past 2:30 it dies. No roast defects, no astringency, no nothing. It's like drinking the hole in the donut.

I don't know. I've had lots of fast finish roasts, since they are all the rage now. All of them are juicy, but often chlorinated, unsweetened grapefruit juicy. The landing pad on fast finish roasts is minute, and I strongly doubt that RORs are a useful navigation aid.

I know several roasters whose cuppers became so accustomed to the aggressive astringency and grassiness of faulty fast finish roasts that they were no longer capable of even distinguishing drinkable from undrinkable lots. A few caught themselves and have made changes; but many are still in this hole. Since they are proprietary about their profiles, I don't know if the ones who have improved have backed off the fast finishes, or whether they've achieved some kind of data driven perfection.

#32: Post by **gr2020** » August 30th, 2018, 2:04 pm

Almico wrote:I carry 10 coffees. 5 of them are blends. The other 3 are SOs that are part of my blends that also are wonderful as SO. 2 are SOs that rotate in and out with the season. I sell 3 bags of a blend to every bag of SO. Those customers want those coffees to taste the same every time. Being able to do this demonstrates competency in roasting control.

I'm not a roaster - but as a customer, I agree completely here. If I buy a coffee, and I like it, and I buy the same coffee two weeks later (and it's not supposed to be a limited-time seasonal sort of thing), then I want it to taste pretty much the same. If it doesn't, and I don't like it as much the second time, I likely won't order it again for a long time. And, fair or not, I'll probably blame the roaster, and assume that they're inconsistent.

August 30th, 2018, 3:23 pm

another_jim wrote:I don't know. I've had lots of fast finish roasts, since they are all the rage now. All of them are juicy, but often chlorinated, unsweetened grapefruit juicy. The landing pad on fast finish roasts is minute, and I strongly doubt that RORs are a useful navigation aid.

I know several roasters whose cuppers became so accustomed to the aggressive astringency and grassiness of faulty fast finish roasts that they were no longer capable of even distinguishing drinkable from undrinkable lots. A few caught themselves and have made changes; but many are still in this hole. Since they are proprietary about their profiles, I don't know if the ones who have improved have backed off the fast finishes, or whether they've achieved some kind of data driven perfection.

I'm currently operating under the assumption that to properly execute a fast finish roast, it needs to be coupled with a fast start. Get the beans hot quickly and keep up the pace through the ramp to build the pressure. I know when I hit it right when I get a nice aggressive 1C. Not blistering, but well paced and snappy. 4:30-5:00 dry, 8:15ish 1C and 10:00 drop. Even low 9:00s have resulted in very satisfying coffees with the right bean.

I'm even doing this with a huge pacamara right now: the Honduras I spoke of. You would think a bean that size would need time to develop. But it's fairly high grown and dense and heat moves through quickly. It's still bright and juicy coffee, but no lingering vegetal flavors.

And for frame of reference, I'm not a 3rd wave coffee fan at all. I buy more Brazil than any other coffee by far. I use it exclusively for my iced coffee and 50% of my espresso. I roast it to a nice rolling 2C. It's a big, bold, nutty, carmely chocolate bomb comfort coffee with a hint of spicy nutmeg. It's really hard to say anything bad about this coffee.

For my batch drip I offer a medium roast and a dark and alternate from blends to SOs depending on my bag inventory. If i have to move some Guat that's been on the shelf for a week, I'm brewing Guat in the pot. If the Sumatra needs to go, it's Sumatra for the dark.

I have two basic roast profiles that I use as guides, the fast and the slow. This is the fast. The curve is steepish prior to drop because I find temperature, more than time develops coffee. My palate tells me so and my RoastRite agrees.

and the slow:

I roast my "dark" roasts as well as most central, sumatra and south americans to this profile. If I want a medium roast, I drop before 1C, going by smell. I'm either waiting for the vinegar to dissipate, of for a particular mellow sweetness to arise. When it comes, I drop fast and cool even faster. For a darker roast I just let it glide into 2C and drop. Most of the acidity is gone by then and underdevelopment is not an issue.

For Africa and some centrals that displays a particularly pleasant juiciness, I use the fast profile guide. The RoR is speedy post 1C so I'm sniffing constantly. That's one nice thing about an open top air roaster. It's real easy to smell what's going on.

#34: Post by **Peppersass** » August 30th, 2018, 3:28 pm

another_jim wrote:I don't know. I've had lots of fast finish roasts, since they are all the rage now.

Jim, can you define "fast finish" for this newbie? Do you mean short development time as a percentage of overall roast time, powering too fast through FC, dropping too soon after FC, all of the above, or something else?[/quote]

#35: Post by **Peppersass** » August 30th, 2018, 3:40 pm

Almico wrote:I have two basic roast profiles, the fast and the slow. This is the fast. The curve is steepish prior to drop because I find temperature, more than time develops coffee.

The graphs are confusing because they look virtually identical up to DE, and ET isn't shown on the second graph. Makes me wonder how you stretched the second roast. Did you charge at different temps, but delayed marking the charge, or did you delay increasing temp on the second roast? Or both?

August 30th, 2018, 3:47 pm

These are theoretical roast profiles designed in Artisan and partly based on target milestones and partly based on a desired declining RoR slope. For example: dry occurs at 300* so the dry milestone needs to be placed along the 300* temp axis. The time I should hit 300* depends on what I want the RoR curve to look like. In other words, the RoR slope will be drastically different if I slide the dry milestone point left or right. Open the Artisan design tool and try it out. It's fun.

When I'm roasting, I'm paying more attention to the RoR than the BT curve. BT curves alone can hide a multitude of roasting sins. RoR curves magnify them.

It would be nice to have a profile for every single coffee, based on hours of cupping with pages of roasting notes in front of me. But honestly, I just don't have the time. I'm a one man band with a mortgage and two kids in college.

#37: Post by **jammin** » August 30th, 2018, 4:09 pm

Almico wrote:BT curves alone can hide a multitude of roasting sins. RoR curves magnify them.

It would be nice to have a profile for every single coffee, based on hours of cupping with pages of roasting notes in front of me. But honestly, I just don't have the time. I'm a one man band with a mortgage and two kids in college.

I've been roasting for about 8 years now but this year I fully understand the truth of your thoughts on the BT curve. After really focusing on RoR & percentages combined with adjusting Artisan settings + new lightweight probes I was able to undercover several of these "sins".

In regards to profile for each bean, it dawned a me long ago what a useful tool a multi-barrel sample roaster would be. It seems like in 15 minutes you could cover a couple hours worth of work. I liken it to bore sighting a rifle.

#38: Post by **TomC** » August 30th, 2018, 5:20 pm

Mbb wrote:If you want mechanized short-cuts, repeatable computer profiling, to achieve repeatable quality, you are admitting you lack skill and are not an artist.

You are a simply a paid performer then. A drone...

This is completely untrue and a straw man argument to boot.

another_jim wrote:For the past five years or so, everyone has had the same solution: more technology, more quality control, more data, more theory. The result: the coffee sucks even more.

This is just as wrong. Only difference is everyone is so damn afraid to disagree with Jim and look stupid.

Jim, your food and cooking examples are pretty much always on-point and translate well to roasting coffee well. But many of your arguments you make fall down the same Luddite trap over and over. It's not the technology that is the problem. And it sure as hell isn't an over-use of quality control. If it's the only thing you know or the only thing you can point to that deludes one into thinking they've "roasted well", then it's not going to help you, but that doesn't mean the tech is wrong or that more of it is a bad idea. It just means the wrong person is standing in front of the roaster. But give me a pimply faced teenager pushing a McDonalds big red button to turn out a coffee, if by doing so yields a consistently amazing result that has been tested, tweaked and analyzed. A highly skilled "artist" roaster can still botch up a roast or miss the mark by a landslide and not know what fell thru the cracks. A moderately talented person can apply diligence and use technology to see what happened on previous roasts and try something new.

This whole debate gets tiresome. I don't think roasters want to listen to each other. They just want to be right in their own mind.

And just to clarify an earlier point made earlier in the thread around the time of the thread-split, I was referring to a roaster that is designed to roast nearly on demand, for small scale roaster/cafes. It isn't the Bellwether roaster, but may not be too drastically different. The point was, that it can reproduce a profile with precision and accuracy and since it uses so much dreaded "technology" other users can share results with each other via the cloud if they happen to make for a better cup of coffee. That person "roasting" my coffee may be a pimply-faced teenager too. I can live with that.

#39: Post by **crunchybean** » August 30th, 2018, 5:23 pm

It's not the fault of the roaster it's the fault of the roaster. Go out and buy an Ikawa Pro, learn to sample roast in 3-5 min cup 20 roasts same day. Find the flavors and charistics you like on the big boy. Then find a dead horse and shoot it, for all the time you've already wasted.

Also learn chemistry, viola.

#40: Post by **TomC** » August 30th, 2018, 5:44 pm

hankua wrote:What is the general idea of this design?

Sorry for the delayed reply. He only painted with broad strokes, but basically a recirculating roaster for efficiency, but not the sole method of heating the beans. His design concept focused on specific materials and not just the technology a la Loring. My best guess is something like a Joper, a cast iron drum, many of the components tightly fitted cast iron, but married to a burner system similar to what Loring does to reduce NOXs and increase efficiency, but you'd still get more conductive heat transfer from the drum, like a traditional drum roaster. I would assume this would use some form of burners under/outside of the drum.