I want some coffee!

... but you can fool me pretty easy. My Aillio Bullet R1 roaster has a device built into the front plate that allows the operator to take a look at the beans during the roast. It's a little tubular scoop that can catch a few beans as they crash around inside the drum. Gives the operator a chance to see the bean color and get a whiff of how the roast is progressing, It's called a 'tryer' and it's pretty slick. Recently I've been playing with drum speed. Drum speed wasn't adjustable when I first got the Bullet (it should have been). When I upgraded the power board to V2 (and the control board as well; my Bullet is now a V2 Bullet) I suddenly had control of drum speed. At the suggestion of one Bullet owner, Glen Junkert, I started using a lower drum speed at the start of the roast (D4) as part of something Glen calls a 'heat soak' prior to increasing the power to get to roast temperatures. Midway thru the roast I start increasing drum speed as the roast...

The flavor of the coffee in the cup can vary a lot with temperature. Thompson Owen has mentioned that in at least a couple of his articles, but it was also introduced in the early pages of a non-ficiton titled The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers. In one of those early paragraphs Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the American of Yemen heritage and the subject of the book, orders a couple pour-overs at Blue Bottle Coffee at Jack London Square in Oakland, CA. It was a special Ethiopian coffee he'd had in the past and asked the author to let it cool before trying it in order to let the special flavors and sweetness present themselves. I have no idea what specific Ethiopian they had, and likely it wouldn't make any difference since things like this are often harvest-specific. Still, I thought 'what the hell... let's see what happens'. We happened to be having an Ethiopian Yirgachef (a favorite) and I'll be damned. It tasted completely different by the time I got to the bottom of th...

Friday I roasted 2.2 kgs of Costa Rica don Oscar Limones and struggled with managing heat toward the end of the roast. I was concerned if all my fussing around had been enough to save the roast. So on Saturday we tried a cup instead of waiting at least 24 hrs to let the coffee 'rest'. To my taste it was totally blah... like having some water using your just-emptied coffee cup without rinsing it. I knew it was coffee but all the things I cherish were watered down. The Admiral (my biggest fan!) said I had no idea what I was talking about. I blamed it on screwing up the brew but that was no more than a WAG. So I was uneasy about this 2nd try on Sunday. Everything was brewed the same- same amount of coffee (I measure the coffee for the morning brew by volume instead of properly using a scale); same amount of water (again, I use volume instead of a scale like I should); the temperature of the water ( a bonaVITA kettle set to 197°F); wet the grinds and wait for the bloom; and last ...

We finally got a cool day- high of 82°F. If this were March it would have been hot, but this is July and you take what you can get! And what we got was 4 batches of COSTA RICA don Oscar Limones' finest. I did a pound of this in mid-June and really liked it. Then 9 days ago I roasted some and got some really odd behavior after 1C: the temperature dropped off so fast as 1C began I thought the power board might have failed: Ideally (if I manage to do my job right!) I should see a gradual decline in Rate of Rise down to about 10F°/minute by the end of the roast (the green line I added to tthe chart). Instead RoR dropped like a stone and I wasn't sure all the button pushing was doing any good. Eventually it recovered but I was very uneasy about the roast quality so it sat in the fridge. So this time I was on the lookout for odd roaster behavior for the whole roast since I couldn't believe this was related to something specific to the beans. Notice the difference? Neither do I! O...

The daytime temps here in sunny (i.e. HOT ) SE Arizona have been a pain. I roast coffee for a few others and daytime high's have been prohibitive. I try to hand out coffee that is 24 hrs out of the roaster to give our friends time to use it all before the peak flavor is too far gone. Last Wednesday I managed to get in 3 roasts but that left me short by 2# so I filled in with some I had stock piled. One of my friends said 'not to worry' as he had some backup on the way from Peet's. Yesterday I discovered a CARE package of 1# of Peet's decaf, just out of their roaster 48 hours before. Amazing to get coffee from a commercial roaster with that kind of date! Thanks Will... much appreciated! More importantly, the cup I just brought out to the casita is really good. Darker than I usually do a decaf but about right for a Mocca/Mokha/Moka (the spelling depends on your ethnic origin or who did the import). The darkness of the roast depends on what the roaster is trying to em...

The hot weather makes it both uncomfortable to roast and introduces the risk of damage to the roaster from excessive temperature when it's running. And that means the heat is getting in the way of having coffee on hand for the morning brew. But if I had some Cuban coffee on hand, this ad suggests I might be able to get the roasting done before the Bullet died! [Thanks to conchscooter of Key West Diaries for the image!] We got hooked on Cuban coffee back when we moved on our Gemini catamaran to Key West in mid-2002. You can find a decent cup of Cuban at pretty much any place that caters to tourists with offerings of snacks/food/groceries, but there are a couple that we favored- Five Brothers either in-town or up on Ramrod Key at MM-26 El Mocho which is a working-dude's cafe on Stock Island (where our marina was) If you're a 3rd wave coffee snob (I really hope I'm not!), you might find Cuban coffee a little on the rough side thanks to the robusta varietal coffee bea...

... by the time the temperature drops enough to roast. The weather is so hot I'm reluctant to fire up the roaster. What a bummer (haven't heard *that* word in about 50 years, right?). The forecast is for about 105°F tomorrow (Saturday) and about 107°F on Sunday. The tiny shop where I roast is like an oven when the temperatures rise so I find excuses to put off my chores. Monday is supposed to havee a high down into the upper 90s so I'll give it a try then. Early. And whoever said 'but it's a dry heat' likely made that observation from their air conditioned office.

This morning it was the new Costa Rica don Oscar Limones . All I can say is... wow! What a great cup of coffee. I think I've made it clear I'm not able to distinguish individual components of 'flavor'. It comes at me all together leaving me unable to describe why I like one coffee and not another. In fact I'm so bad at it I tend to put people that can do that sort of thing on a pedestal. I suspect they have taken the time (and $$- training isn't cheap) to become SCA certified. At this point I've come to realize that a coffee which mentions 'chocolate', 'sugar' and 'body' is more often than not a coffee I can roast adequately well to find something I like. Coffees that include 'bright' or 'acidity' tend to fall to the wayside and left in the stockpile of disappointments that someone else might well have enjoyed. Hence my reference to a description 'a chocolate sundae' though that reference is lacking. Anyway, ...

Sweet Maria's had a new offering that sounded like it might work for me. They call it Costa Rica don Oscar Limones which is a farm in the Tarrazu valley... about 6,000 ft elevation. From the Cupping Notes- The name " Limones " may seem a bit disconnected from what's in the cup. Limones isn't a bright, citric coffee. Rather, it's more of a simple cup profile, with sweet to bittering flavor characteristics that respond readily to roast development. City+ roasting highlights flavors of toasted sugar and moderate acidity like white grape juice, with softer chocolate finishing flavors drawn out in the aftertaste. If you're for more of a chocolate-toned cup, extend roast development into Full City, or even Full City+. In that tight roast range you'll be rewarded with bittering cocoa flavors, developed roast tones, reverberating bass notes and carbonized sugar bitter-sweetness in the aftertaste. Limones also delivers as espresso, a "classic...

Today it's Ethiopian organic Limu Kossa Farm decaf , mentioned in the previous post. We tried it for a late-morning cup. I think I may have finally managed to roast a decaf I actually like. I was very pleased with this first try. Sweet, and like most Ethiopian coffees it's filled with interesting flavors that keep changing as the cup cools. And the December Dripper I bought for brewing pour-over coffee worked great. Pour-over is a fussy process with a lot of weighing of empty cup, coffee, then water. Then repeat for the next cup because I have to do our 2 cups sequentially since there's only one scale. But the pour-over results were good, so that negates the annoying sequential process. "Learn to love it!"

I had thought I'd do 3 or more roasts but got side-tracked reading some info I'd gotten on Aillio's Roast.World forum related to heat-soak. So I managed a single roast of some decaf (still struggling to roast decaf I'm excited about!). The roast I did sounded interesting: ETHIOPIA Organic Limu Kossa SWP (decaf). Not exactly a 'chocolate sundae', but still... The Cupping Notes told me I'd have to go a little dark (as usual). I tried to merge that target with another attempt at incorporating a 'heat-soak' described by Glenn Junkert (@quartzglen on Roast.World; formerly the roaster at Hunter Bay Coffee in Missoula, MT). The heat-soak requires changes in drum speed (as well as power and fan settings) . Since I can control drum speed now, why not give it a whirl? "Fragrance and aroma are potent. Complex molasses and sorghum sweeteners, pine syrup aroma, dried berry, raisin and prune, big cocoa roast flavors when roasted dark. City to Full City. Goo...

Kind'a out of the blue I received a shipping notice. I had guessed So. Korea was still shut down but there was unreported activity at the December Dripper factory! The 2 drippers arrived in perfect shape and work exactly as advertised. What's unique about their design is that they are throttle-able. You can set the base to expose 3, 2, 1 or 0 drain holes in the base of the dripper. That means the user can control the flow rate and ultimately the amount of extraction time during brewing. My first try was with some decaf which came out so strong I thought I might grow hair on my teeth. Apparently S. Koreans are studly coffee drinkers and have my utmost respect! Using their recommended ratio of 300 gm water to 20 gm coffee (15:1) was more than I could handle. Our usual ratio is 410 gm water to 20 gm coffee (20.5:1). A second try a few days later gave me about what I was accustomed to with better flavor extraction. At first blush I'm very impressed. But the process is complicat...