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.