Well that's odd...

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! OK... a slight exaggeration, but for all the power I applied there wasn't a sufficient response. Just a replay (ignore the numbers on the right- they depend on where I happened to have the mouse pointer when I did the screen capture). I couldn't believe what I was seeing but it appears this variety of beans loses an enormous amount of heat starting at the beginning of 1C and adding power to the drum isn't enough to stop the reaction.

On top of that, Scott Rao in his newest book "Best Shop Practices" says this is what to expect at 1C and since I prefer to ignore a lot of what he says I guess I was doomed to wear his prediction. Damn!

So I did 4 roasts total and the charts all look pretty much like this. Since the first batch tasted so good I guess I can only hope this does too.

We'll see...