Roasting for filter - need help!!

mycuppa

The terminology "development" and it's relationship to 1st crack is utter nonsense. Coffee develops the moment dries out. Hence, thinking you can **measure** a coffee's development by signal of 1st crack is wrong........so very wrong. What happened leading up to 1st crack - that will answer your straw and sour question, not whether you think XX seconds past 1st crack is the key. Game time for coffee roasting starts the moment the beans enter a vessel.......it's about every single second, not just the signal from 1st crack. That's enough......you can work out the rest from here.

Brett_H

Makes sense Jeff. The small domestic equipment we roast on with it's many and varied idiosyncrasies means that I don't get really hung up on repeatability or set roast milestones. Just the taste.

[deleted]

Given how much has been written about roasting coffee (a lot of it is rubbish) sometimes it's helpful to be pointed towards where some useful information can be found. This site has a lot of very helpful stuff and will certainly be enough to get you started... 😉 https://www.perfectdailygrind.com/category/coffee-roasting/ Mal.

West_Village

Thanks guys appreciate the tips and will absolutely go back to the drawing board to evaluate pre-heats and play around with charge temps. Pulling another v60 this morning (technique slowly getting better and beans had a few more days to chill) I've noticed that there isn't a lot of acidity in the cup nor much sweetness or flavour for that matter ( given it's an Ethiopian I'm surprised) but that has also likely indicated to me that I've fluffed the roast. Is that what you guys would term a baked roast? The charge temps were non existent! And so was the flavour and acidity. So from my understanding based on the very helpful comments above and perusing that very helpful website Mal, I should be trying to get a higher charge temp to get better flavour development. And whilst that's something a bit more difficult to achieve consistently in a behmor I could still try to mitigate that via a pre-heat. Hopefully I'm kinda on the right track? If not, happy to have my thoughts corrected.

West_Village

In terms of pre-heating I might try pick up a $20 infrared thermometer of evil bay to see what sort of pre-heat temps you can get on the behmor and how much you lose when inserting the beans after the pre-heat.

[deleted]

Yeah mate... :-| I wouldn't worry about trying to use an IR thermometer for this. If you mount a t/couple in the roast chamber, coupled with an appropriate interface and software so that you can track the environment temperature, and maybe the exhaust temperature, this would give you more useful info to work with. Even better would be to mount a t/couple through the shaft of the drum such that the bean mass is always in contact with it, will be even more useful. Quite a few people have done this on the other Oz Coffee place... 😉 If your Behmor is still under warranty though, I'd just stick with the t/couple mounted in the recommended place by the Ozzy distributor... 8) Mal.

Brett_H

Great stuff Mal, thanks! I've got the new Behmor and despite the options to tweak during the roast I think we are hamstrung in regards to charge temperature. The little unit can't possibly act like a big drum roaster so some accommodation of technique is required. What that is I'm not exactly sure but I'm happy with my results. Perhaps I have a tin palate 😃

[deleted]

Brett H wrote:

I've got the new Behmor and despite the options to tweak during the roast I think we are hamstrung in regards to charge temperature. The little unit can't possibly act like a big drum roaster so some accommodation of technique is required. What that is I'm not exactly sure but I'm happy with my results. Perhaps I have a tin palate 😃

Yep... 🙂 Indeed mate. The Behmor is a great little home roaster and probably one of the best around for what it is. Loads of flexibility for those who like to experiment and straight forward options for those who just want to push a couple of buttons then be rewarded with some pretty darn nice coffee for a minimum expenditure of effort. Don't get too hung up on the techniques that are required when using a commercial style Drum Roaster. Different setups need different techniques and many are not transferable between different roaster designs, and even between different drum roaster designs. Find what works best with the roaster you have and then make the most with that. I've tried a few different designs over the years and scientifically developed the most satisfactory process for each, that gave me what I want in the cup. It's what I recommend to anyone who's serious about getting the best that a bean has to offer. I used a Behmor for quite some time too and developed a technique and profiles that worked best for me, with a range of different bean offerings over that time. If you're not totally happy with the quality of the result in the cup, then you need to seek knowledge, experiment, keep concise records and, dare I say it, practice... 😛 Mal.

artman

The bean temp probe is surprisingly easy to make and works great too. The only permanent “mod” is to drill the centre of the drum spindle, otherwise it’s easily reversible. I think it would be hard for someone to say that it effects the warranty? Cheers

West_Village

My behmor is still under warranty so I'm a bit reluctant to start playing with it just yet. For those who have thermocouples in their behmors, do you know what sort of temps you can reach in terms of a pre-heat and how much you might lose out the door when you open to load beans in? More so curious than any roasting application at this stage I'll be firing up the behmor today with a pre-heat and a slight power drop around the drying phase to slow down the caramelisation process. I'll see how that translates versus my prior roast of the Ethiopian.

Brett_H

Wonderful posts folks... thank you! Mal, I think your middle paragraph especially should be the mantra for home-roasters. Excellent!