What are we having today?

That's our traditional question every morning as we finish eating and uncover our coffee for the first sip. It's a morning ritual that doesn't vary much and I look forward to it. It gives me a chance to talk about what I roasted. I skip the flowery descriptions that are in the cupping notes below- they're mostly lost on us.

This morning's Colombia Timaná was pretty good so it rates a +1 on may makeshift  -1|0|+1 scale... no fractions allowed. Celia was delighted but I thought it was missing something. Yet the preceding day I was very happy with these same beans. So it appears it's sensitive to the brewing process which recently has been changing. (Guess I'd better do one about that too.)

This morning we had Colombia Timaná Vereda San Marcos from Sweet Maria's-

Cupping Notes:

The dry fragrance has smells of sweet baked goods, oatmeal raisin cookies, banana bread, and more. The wet aroma is along the same lines and shows sweet dried fruited smells at City as well as bittersweet cocoa at City+ roast level and beyond.
I wound up running three roasts of San Marcos: City, City+ and Full City. All three roasts had dark, dried fruited characteristics like raisin, date, and prune, and a thick layer of sweet, raw sugary flavors. City was the brightest of the bunch, an acidic impression that reminded me of ripe blueberry. Then at City+, that's when layered chocolate roast flavors take center stage, a stark contrast to the brew at just a shade lighter. City+ and Full City roasts are heavily weighted in cocoa flavors - dark cacao, fine drinking cocoa, Hershey's chocolate, and more. The cups are bodied, creamy, and are going to work well as espresso too.

Now the gripe. Timaná is one I bought in November 2019. The description reads like what I usually hope to find at Sweet Maria's- the promise of a 'chocolate sundae' (not really, but that's what I call it). Somehow, with beans that ought to be perfect, I keep hitting wide of the mark: who forgot the &^%$ chocolate syrup? Well, I guess that would have been me.

Because I've missed on too many of these promising coffees, I've moved away from the 'accepted knowledge' that the correct shape of the roasting curve, as defined by the rate of change in the measured temperature of the beans (what's called RoR), that curve should peak not long after charging the drum (charging = adding the green beans) and then decline steadily to a rate of change ending at something around 10F° per minute to 5F° per minute. No wobbles in RoR allowed on the way down.

This roasting magic was proposed by Scott Rao as a guide for professional roasters attending his seminars and documented in approximate terms in his book The Coffee Roaster's Companion. And when you're starting out, this sort of concrete guideline is exactly what you need. I've come to the unpopular conclusion that Rao's guiding parameter might leave the coffee with too much acid taste- what is identified in cupping notes as 'bright'.

When I re-read the section that talks about Rate of Rise curves (mathematically, the first derivative of Bean Temp), I found Rao addresses what I had thought I noticed independently. In a set of 3 nested curves representing his idealized RoR (p 32 of The Coffee Roaster's Companion)-

• the curve peaking 1st is labeled 'acidity'
• the curve peaking 2nd is labeled 'aroma'
  
• the curve peaking 3rd is labeled 'body'
• the curve peaking 4th is labeled 'bitterness' and depicts a roast gone bad because the heat was applied too slowly and for too long

These labels (acidity, aroma, body, and bitterness) suggest what is emphasized in the roast by causing the RoR to peak at 1C either earlier or later. So if I want to de-emphasize acidity, I should strive to heat the beans at a rapid pace but timed so I hit 1C a little later than I did on the roasts I wasn't happy with.

Nothing is labeled 'chocolate' (it's never that easy!), but cupping notes usually suggest a darker roast to emphasize that flavor. Darker roasts are esdy to achieve- just watch the temperature of the beans as they roast so that, for example, if I want to hit FC (recall that this is a visual clue), then I should keep the roast going till around 444°F. Roasting lighter or darker is the easiest part when using the Bullet.