YDandA wrote:JK, this, plus a profile I saw earlier today will prove to be the most important things I have learned since I got my drum roaster last month. Thanks!

Check out this guy's blog. I've gotten some good insight from his Sumatra Roasting as well.

http://kostverlorenvaart.blogspot.com

JK wrote:Dry/ Middle/ Finish Phases
30*/ 20*/ 10* ROR (rate of rise *F during these phases)

These are thought to be average ROR temperatures for roasting phases..

....

20 and 10, i.e. 11 and 5.5 in Celsius degrees could work for most coffees, but 30F = 16.7C is definitelly too low ROR for dry phase, would take much more than 5 minutes to reach 150C.
25 to 40C (45-70F) degrees are much more realistic ROR values for dry phase, to start yellowing after 3-5 minutes.

Use your trier and cup your roasts...if it smells and tastes good, you are usually doing something right.

I also like to pull beans from the trier throughout the roast, cut through them, and evaluate the evenness of roast in the bean.

I don't think you have to look much further that H-B, such as: Development time as a ratio of roast time by Scott Rao There is a wealth of information right here.

From my limited experience, coffee roasting is a bit science, some art, but mostly alchemy.

As in photography too, where rules exist and should be learnt to know how to break them

and practice.

100,000 hours if I remember Outliers correctly.

11 years 24/24 365/365... a bit too much practice... and coffee to drink

renatoa wrote:As in photography too, where rules exist and should be learnt to know how to break them

Yes. The hardest thing about roasting coffee is not getting trapped by a process that worked well a few times.

I have a very stubborn Colombia that I just can't find anything nice to say about. I've been using it to teach my son to roast. On a whim I tried a 6:00/5:00/4:30 roast. Declining curve, maybe 7* RoR over the 4:30. Drop temp was about 430*, no 2C. I expected flavor notes of charred, corrugated cardboard. Instead I got a nicely smooth chocolate bomb with none of the papery defects I had been trying to avoid for months. It was sweet and completely unbaked, and not totally void of fruit. It was very enjoyable cooled to room temperature (my preferred "cupping" method), and would likely make for a very good iced coffee.

So the lesson is, there always seems to be lessons...and painfully few rules.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
K.

Thanks to everyone. re: h-b is enough.. yea, I like the conversations and would rather stick with one forum and get to know people etc.

I checked into a bit of mill city... it helped.. then I got tired of learning about roasting when I knew I didn't have any coffee and I had just baked a pile of bread, so I got the roaster heated up. Aside from all of the difficult to control factors.. like I'm roasting outside in high humidity while a typhoon is rolling in .. go ahead and laugh.. if that isn't enough, I don't have myself setup for the IR burner or data recording. So I'm roasting over a portable cooking stove and doing everything by sense/observation, which was the point of the post anyway.

1rst point is that I ignored getting back down to 100C after I charged as is discussed in the instructions for the burner. I went with a time -ish and waited for the thermo to stop dropping.. it was a couple of minutes from charge to restarting the burner with the fan off. then I got the burner going and kept medium and it rose up to 160 ish for a few minutes... the beans were hanging in a kind of light brown/yellow stage.. I felt like it needed to move along so I turned it on full (note, my portable on full is probably like 1/2 on the IR) it got into cracking I tapered off and kept it venting /exhaust (I don't have speed control, so I turn it off and on some because I was noticing it seemed like the burner couldn't overcome the exhaust, I'll build a control for it ) I extended the heat rise time between like 195 - 230 ish .. to try to match approx some of the profiles discussed and then pulled/cooled off when it looked/smelled right.. I was afraid I'd botched the whole thing because it was smoking more than any of the other roasts I'd done.. but I took it in and made 2 cups .. it was fantastic. better than the same one done on the automatic roaster at the shop.

By compressing the roast into a set of time/temp curves and ignoring the therm at certain points.. it's working much better. long way to go for my 100000000 hours to mastery but I've crossed a threshold.

yay and mmmmm....