I love the article and very much respect all involved. But I think some readers could get misled to think they can do any roast with their machine. Even with the machines used in this study, I'd bet some roast profiles may not work across all.
Rob mentioned in the video that paying attention to the progress of the roast (time to yellow, tan, FCs ect) across all roasters will produce the same coffee (and absolute temps cannot be trusted across roasters). This is still hard for me to swallow. ALL roasters is far too broad. Perhaps it works with most high quality roasters such as Dietrich, Loring and others. But I feel thermal paths of these roasters can be significantly off balance and forged in the design. For instance, I've heard stories of some Toper roasters being different. Rob does mention some roasters do sway the operator to a particular profile, so maybe he has covered this detail.

I think they're writing to professional roasters using equipment capable of being controlled for the profiles they explored.

For hobbyists using anything from a frying pan and whisk to a barbecue grill and drum and up it's a different matter until we upgrade to sufficient roasting gear.

drgary wrote:I think they're writing to professional roasters using equipment capable of being controlled for the profiles they explored.

Gary, the first thing that came to my mind when I read the article is my DIY roaster, which could produce a fast profile, but would scorch the beans badly in the process. It did great slow darker roasts. I'd think even across professional machines, there would be profiles that certain machines are good for and bad for. And some, possibly the profiles picked for this article, which all would duplicate. My only take away from the article is that these machines can duplicate the same roasts (light and dark) if someone wanted too spend the time to truly control them.

yakster wrote: [*]Rob emphasized that timing of the roast milestones is more important to match roasts than profile curves. The milestones should match within a second and the roast color should be within one point.

What I find most interesting is that this conclusion, which both the video and the article reach, is wholly consistent with the conclusions reached in this video comparing cooling methods.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVPY1DnlvcE

The lesson I get from this video is that it's not the method that you use to cool the beans, it's getting the cooling time as close to 4 minutes as possible. Not too fast and not to slow. The cooling method is less important. The methods that got to cool in 4 minutes were essentially indistinguishable from each other.