treq10 wrote:I like to roast light but with just enough sugar caramelization to hold up to milk. It's somewhere between a true light roast and a true medium roast LOL. It's all so whacky in the end to try to come up with narrow definitions for roast/flavor profiles. Just do and drink what you like! There is so much great coffee out there!!

Might be time for a new thread, but I'm going to take that first sentence and run with it...
I've been having a terrible time getting merely drinkable filter roasts with my new Bullet ([troll]Anyone with an open flame and greens can roast for espresso[/troll]). Not only can I for some reason never maintain a constantly declining ROR in shorter roasts, i've found it nearly impossible to get a roast that spends less than ~45% of its time in the Maillard phase which is obliterating the terroir out of any coffee I use. I'm sure this is all due to a lack of skill, but out of frustration I whipped out my old frankenstein HG/BM inspired DIY roaster that was able to churn out exceptional nordic/light roasts with ease. I have already cannibalized the temp logging bits for another project, which was insanely stupid, but I noticed several things immediately now that I have more experience with a different kind of roaster:
1) The "drying phase" (for the sake of conversation we'll call this the time of drop to a lack of green color in the beans) takes up ~60% of the roast time. The roast then speeds through Maillard and FC, almost the exact opposite of my bullet roasts.
2) FC is roughly half the time than in my bullet (45-60 secs vs 90-120 secs)
3) The aromas during Maillard are much more intensely from the terroir, instead of the generic sugary smells I get from the bullet
My conclusions:
1) Convection is far and away the superior way to initiate heat transfer to beans
2) The longer you spend in Maillard the less of the terroir you'll have in the beans at the end of the roast (side stepping light vs medium here)
3) The shorter your FC the easier it is to roast "light"
4) A secondary conclusion from #2 and #3 is you want to have a relatively high RoR during maillard and FC
I'm starting to believe that if you want to roast light you either need to embrace the soak method and have your RoR peak at end of drying (followed by constantly declining RoR, no idea how this would actually be accomplished), or utilize the hot start fast finish method. But who the hell knows, the Bullet has made me realize I'm a terrible roaster who just happened to get lucky with a convection based approach in the past. Now if you'll excuse me I have another 40lbs of coffee to waste while bashing my head against a spinning drum...