Tim Wendelboe recently posted a roastery tour on IG while they were in production. Was very interesting looking at the roaster / profile in action as it does not subscribe to "best practice".

I wonder if this is why Loring always gets referred to as a "whole new world" or some other statement to separate it from the traditional drum mantra?

In the screen shots saved looks like they are pretty close to 6min "dry" what ever that means then 9 min FCS at 200C with 1 min development.

If these profiles were posted here for feedback the imeditate reactions (myself included) would be look at the flat ROR before FCS, too much heat ....then big crash, must be baked.

The "rules" must not apply to Loring, ive recently been drinking a Kenya and Geisha from TW and they really are in a league of their own.

Note that I also purchased the most recent Rao defect kit with extra "good" which were vac sealed and frozen. This is also a really delicious roast, excellent all round balance. TW roasts are super fruit sweet with vibrant acidity and can really take aggressive high extractions.

Anywho, maybe there are other ways which I need to explore more?

ET and BT seem to go in parallel. Is the BT probe reading a lot of the hot air here?

So - I roast on a Loring, and this isn't a Loring anomaly. I know a guy who roasted for Stumptown (and another for Intelly) back in the day, and both approached their roasting similarly. The idea or theory was that by extending the roast from the beginning until "end of dry" or yellow, you are developing the inside of the coffee a bit and drying out the seed, which will slow down Maillard reactions. Why would you want to do that? Their thinking is that we want to preserve as much of the little reducible sugars that we have in the seed in order to amplify the sweetness - and since acid is necessary for perceiving sweetness in coffee, we linger for a longer time at lower temps before the malic and citric acid would begin to experience their rapid degradation. And then, you build momentum in the drum by increasing your heat and flooring it between the beginning of caramelization (~340°F) and crack so as to preserve those sugars and not have them caramelize (since the theory was that more time = more caramelization) and then pull the rug out by either slamming on the brakes by flooding the roasting environment with air, cutting the gas, or both (the Stumptown roaster used to kill the gas entirely at crack and just coast to the finish, but on some coffees would give it a 'lick of flame').

I don't buy the reasoning; I think it has to do more with baking out certain flavors and preserving acidity than with preserving reducible sugars, but hey-you never know. Those early roasts were super distinctive and signature to their brands.

MaKoMo wrote:ET and BT seem to go in parallel. Is the BT probe reading a lot of the hot air here?

Biting my tongue to resist the obvious joke, but I've noticed this as well. I'm not sure how fast the paddles turn in a Loring, but it sure does not seem like there is a rolling bean mass at the bottom of the drum where the BT probe can measure more bean than air. It seems like the ET probe is just higher in the drum and therefore reading hotter due to heat rising to the top. It's hard to otherwise explain the immediacy of the BT/ET relationship.


I've been operating under the assumption that best practice seems to be correlating dry time with post 1C development time. In other words, if you are going to have a short dev time after 1C, then pre dry should be fast as well. I have never had good results stretching dry, and then dropping a minute after first crack. Also never had a good roast where I zipped through dry in 3 or 4 minutes and then dragged out post 1C dev time 3:00+.

I do not believe that much coffee gets "developed" during dry, while free water is still present. Development (chemical reactions) starts when coffee starts turning tan (then orange then brown). But I do believe strongly that what happens during dry sets up how a coffee gets developed later on. A fast dry time should build more internal bean pressure. More internal bean pressure, like a pressure cooker, should force heat into the bean before free water (steam) has a chance to escape. If you drag out dry, then steam has more time to escape through the shell and less pressure is built up and "cooking" slows down.

It is very possible than none of this is true and it's just confirmation bias when I cup my roasts, but if I believed that, I would change methodologies. My interest is only in the 'how" of great coffee, not defending my pet theories about the "why". I really don't care about why, but it's fun to banter about it.

Regarding Tim's coffee, I have had a few samples and have always found it to be good. But Tim goes to great effort and distance in picking out the coffees he roasts. He even has his own coffee farm I believe. The anomaly of less than stellar roast curves might just be a case of starting with better coffees to begin with.

Almico wrote:
Regarding Tim's coffee, I have had a few samples and have always found it to be good. But Tim goes to great effort and distance in picking out the coffees he roasts. He even has his own coffee farm I believe. The anomaly of less than stellar roast curves might just be a case of starting with better coffees to begin with.

Thanks archipelago for the Loring insight! Again Alan some good food for thought especially regarding the above. TW does go to great lengths to source top quality green which could make all the difference. I had a Colombian from TW once that I found a bit flat with overpowering vegetal soup character made worse by the inherant herbal florals. But I could tell that the green quality was next level very clean, sweet, distinct and could only wonder what it would be like if it was fully developed.

But yeah when they get it right there seems to be that super distinctive quality about the roast which stands out.

Cheers