Shoot, I'm just seeing this. I'd be in if there were another slot. Y'all enjoy!

Curiously checking Aidas website for 2021 crop green every week. Also, are you going to separate the greens by process this year?

Always!

aidabatlle wrote: Always!

Aida, I wish you would charge what your coffee is worth ! So many farms in Central America (and beyond) are selling their product for such low prices compared to the work and toil required to produce it, and the overall quality of the beverage it makes. I'm fortunate to be able to pick and choose what I buy, and with a bit or discretion, many are incredible bargains. But nothing compares to the coffee I've been buying from you for the past 15 or so years.

As a future investment of a higher return on your crop would create (me paying a fair price now for what is truly incredible coffee), you'd be even better prepared in the future to deliver more and more amazing coffees to the specialty coffee consuming world. I'd mightily be willing to pay more for now for a chance to get something even greater tomorrow ( or simply knowing that me paying a fair price for the quality means that you'll be equipped to deliver the same or perhaps even better quality in the following years).. People need to remember the context. Aida Batlle beat the hell out of of the specialty coffee market before Geisha coffee was even a thing! Her coffee and the attention to the details of it and processing was just that bewildering and hard to come by.

Seriously, I challenge anyone to deliver a competing coffee that has the same quality, same brightness, cleanliness, sparkling and nuanced flavors, and yet also delivering the amazing body that Aida Batlle delivers, at at even 3x the price. I'm glad I have some vacuum sealed and sleeping in my chest freezer for later dates.

It wouldn't be an easy feat for me to count the amount of private messages both here and other social media channels I've received over the years about your Finca Kimimanjaro and how the coffee is perceived as such a true gem in the world of specialty coffee; most especially at the price it can be secured at. I can't wait to see what the future holds for people and farms like you. I hope it supports all your efforts.

The raves for this coffee are not exaggerated. As others have said, the greens are beautifully curated and are easy to roast. While I'm not a gifted taster, I get the primary flavor notes reported here. More important, the coffee tastes wonderful -- one of the best coffees I've encountered.

I did two quick roasts last week prior to leaving for vacation. Both were done with edited versions of Ikawa's Espresso Roast 1 profile, which I've found to work well for a variety of greens. All I did to the profile was shorten the roast time from 10:09 to 9:30 after finding that the roasts with the original profile were coming out too dark. Since editing the profile, I've found it best to drop the roast based on DT to get the desired color/development.

I let the first roast go 1:30 past 1C, and it came out medium-light, 82 on the Agtron gourmet scale:



After seven days of rest this roast tasted nice and bright, the way I like espresso, somewhat sweet and nuanced. A very good cup, but not much in the way of fruit.

I dropped the second roast 1:00 after 1C, and it came out light, 99 on the Agtron gourmet scale, pretty much where I wanted it:



After eight days of rest this coffee tasted great. Very bright and very sweet with lots of the flavors mentioned here. After roasting I smelled some distinct baking-bread flavors in the kitchen, and worried that maybe this roast would be under-developed, but that wasn't the case. No vegetal flavors at all. I think this bean can be taken quite light. That said, I do like bright (not sour) coffee, so it may be that this roast would be too acidic for some of you.

As you can see, the profile and times for my 50g Ikawa Pro V3 sample roaster won't translate directly to the drum roasters most of you have. The charge temp is quite low, then ramps up quickly. I mark color change (dry) based on temperature -- 300F -- not color -- and as with other fluid bed roasters, so I've heard, 300F occurs quite a bit sooner -- at about 2:25 -- than with drum roasters like my Quest M3II with M3S drum, where it generally happens between 4-5 minutes. 1C is only a little sooner than it would be in my Quest, but it's at a much higher temp -- about 400F versus about 370F or so.

I mark 1C when I hear the very first pop or two. I do this for several reasons. First, marking when 1C gets rolling usually results in a darker roast than desired. Second, I think there's something to Roa's discussion about when to mark 1C in his Coffee Roasting Best Practices book. My impression from his examples is that I may have been waiting too long to mark 1C, with the result being more development time than I was aiming for. With my roaster I can't see the "spike in ETROR" Roa uses, so I just mark 1C when I hear the first pop or two, rather than waiting for full rolling 1C. This seems to be working well for me in terms of correlating DT with color. Most beans hit my preferred roast levels about 1:30 after 1C for medium-light or about 1:00 after 1C for light. %DTR looks low compared with some of your curves, but I'm not paying much attention to that metric these days. DT seems to be more reliable.

I wouldn't make too much of the RoR curvs. The scale makes RoR look pretty flat, and there's no way to change that. Also, it's not clear to me whether the RoR of an exhaust temperature probe in a fluid bed roaster has the same meaning as the RoR of a probe buried in the bean mass of a drum roaster. I'll need to do a lot more roasts in the V3 and study a lot more RoR curves to get a handle on that. All I can say is that the coffee tastes really good, not baked, no astringency, etc.

I should mention that this is the first washed coffee I've roasted in years (I have a freezer full of Naturals.) I'm looking forward to comparing it with the Finca Kilimanjoro Natural I got from Roastmasters in September 2020. I roasted some of the Natural in the Quest in February and don't recall how it tasted (didn't make any notes). Not good enough to remember, probably, but I'm sure that wasn't the coffee. It was me not being able to coax high-quality roasts from the Quest (or, at least not being able to roast Naturals well.) I've been doing a lot better with with Ikawa Pro V3, which fits my style and abilities much better.

It's an incredible treat to be able to purchase a wonderful coffee directly from the producer and to be able to interact with her here. Aida, you are a treasure.

baldheadracing wrote: (*) Roasting by screen size means that I roast separate batches for greens sized 19/64" and over, 17/64" and 18/64", 15&16, 13&14, and 12/64" and under. I realize that this is excessive, but a) Tim Wendelboe has said that he roasts by screen size when he can get the mill to separate out the greens for him - and b) screens are pretty expensive, and I might as well get full use of them.

Sorry for OT, but that is hardcore cool. I've thought about doing it given some variation in my greens.

Hi Aida, I was wondering when new unroasted beans will be available? I have the washed and like it a lot and would like to try some of the other beans. Thanks!

baldheadracing wrote:FYI, Scott Rao's and Ryan Brown's https://facsimile.coffee subscription service will have Aida Batlle as guest cupper for #7 (order before August 24th). The idea behind their subscription service is the four coffees sent each month are unknown and thus will be cupped blinded, but connect the dots ...

I ordered. As an aside, the subscription auto-renews, so remember to pause/cancel as appropriate.

W00t; I posted separately about this and entirely forgot we had this thread running here! I've been signed up for the first six and have been pretty happy with the quality of the roast, so being able to benchmark if you're ordering Aida's green seems great.