I think I need some help! Brand new!

Roasting on the Bullet R1
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Hey all. I just want to start by saying that I am very excited to be here and to be joining this community full of coffee nerds like myself!

I have just a few questions that I hope someone can help with, and I’ll get into those in just a moment.
I received my Bullet V2 last week. Aside from the seasoning, I have completed only two roasts: one last night, one tonight.

My first roast was a Papua New Guinea. All I did was follow the sample recipe in the manual to the T for this roast, and it turned out pretty delicious! I would post that profile, but I’m only allowed to post one as a newbie. My main issue lie with the second one, anyway. If you would like to see the Papua New Guinea and give feedback, let me know!

For my second roast, I wanted to try something different (probably dumb for a newbie, I know!). I roasted a Monsooned Malabar. I charged 450g. I pretty much followed the same sample recipe, except for the charge weight, and I decided to start at P6, as opposed to P7, just to experiment. It turned out like this:

Monsooned Malabar
Monsooned Malabar1300×635 76.4 KB

As you can probably tell… I had some issues with this one. My RoR (I think) definitely seemed to stagnate a bit. Also, I roasted them for near 19 minutes, and I never heard first crack. I imagine this is an issue… I don’t know enough to say for sure, but my guess is this coffee will probably be baked. I’ll try tomorrow and update, if anyone would like.

Here are my questions:

1. I don’t really understand what I’m looking at in Roast Time, to be honest. If anyone would be willing to help me learn on this front, please PM so we don’t clutter up this thread. I would really love some help!
Despite my efforts of studying what I’m seeing (based off of the key in RT), and google, I’m still confused. It’s making me feel stupid.

2. With the Malabar, do you think the issue was the change I made in starting the roast at P6? Or is there something else I could be doing, and in not doing so I’m potentially ruining the roast?

3. Any thoughts on these profiles or roasting with the Bullet in general would be much appreciated!

I apologize for such a long first post! Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts! Thanks!

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Hi @matthewcwomblewojt welcome!

  1. Rather than searching on google, try the search at the top of this page. There is a ton of information here, all in the context of the bullet.

2&3. Pick up 10 or 20 lbs of an inexpensive bean and do some roasting! You can get them for as little as a couple bucks per pound (search here for “cheap beans”). Try playing around with roaster settings, batch size, and preheat time and temperature, varying each while keeping the others constant. See what these changes do to the curves, first crack times, etc. I did this with a Brazil Cerrado and learned a lot, plus it was fun to play with the new roaster. The effect of power is pretty intuitive, but the fan is less so. Keep in mind that sometimes there is a delay (30 seconds or more) before the effect of a change shows up in the curves.

HTH

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Hey Brad, thanks!

I did try the search here, and couldn’t find too much. I was mostly confused on things like Bean Temp vs. IBTS Temp and B-ROR vs. I-ROR. Also just understanding the idea of declining rate of rise. That being said, I kept doing digging and found a good article (I believe actually by Aillio) that really helped me understand this! I still don’t really understand what each ROR is measuring though. I’ll keep digging on here and see what I can find.

Yes, I am super excited to continue playing around with it!
Theoretically, power wouldn’t increase drum temp, correct? And then fan can help heat or chill, depending on the setting, right? There is so much to learn!
I did not know about the delay, thank you for the heads up!

And thanks for the reply!

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Hey Matthew,
I have been roasting Monsoon Malabar as well with great results. When I started , I stuck with 350g batches and then experimented with the various controls, times, temps etc. I found changes to the power setting much more influential on the roast quality, time etc.

Now I am doing larger batches and have much more consistency, knowing what to look for by doing certain adjustments. My suggestion would be to start with a bit more heat, I am working on P8/P9 start with 750g charge loads.
There is definitely a good thread in this forum on difference between IBTS and BT which explains the Bullet very well. I will see if I can paste a link.

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@Snidely_Whiplash

Thanks for the info! I roasted a second batch and starting with a higher heat definitely helped. I think one of the problems with getting to 1C in the first batch was that my starting temp was too low.
The first batch tasted a lot like Folgers. I don’t mean that in a bad way, per se, just that’s what my mind went too. Based off of that and the aroma, I’m imagining it’s baked. But I wouldn’t know, judging of my lack of experience.

Thank you for linking to the other topics! Those DEFINITELY helped my get a better idea on what I’m looking at. Thanks so much!

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Try this profile for a 350g batch, it was a good result for me.

Roast World - Cup, grade, and analyze your coffee roasts in depth Whiplash/roasts/rmS-4sC_Z3fgVctVAetG8

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image
image2286×1118 144 KB

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I will probably try this tomorrow! Thanks for all your help!

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@bradm also has some really good profiles you can study for 350g batches. With his permission I had used a couple of his roast profiles as a starting point in my learning journey.

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Haha no permission needed they’re all on Roast.World. The 325g batches with … EXCELLENT in the names produced good brewed coffee by my amateur taste. But stay away from the larger ~500g batches. My learning journey has far to go with those :slight_smile:

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Hi @matthewcwomble

Welcome to the enigmatic rabbit hole that is coffee roasting! There is heaps of info in the forum here that will help you along if you search for it. If you’re coming at this green (no pun intended) then learning about the fundamentals and language will benefit you enormously. It can be a little tricky trying to find articles out there but Mill City Roasters have a super in-depth ‘roaster school’ series on Youtube. It will break everything down for you but the information comes thick and fast and it does delve pretty deep so a few re-watches or note taking (or both) will be advantageous.

Best of luck!

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@david.nash.aushr2 Hello!

Thank you for the welcome. Thankfully, I do have a little bit of knowledge. I’ve been a coffee nerd for a few years now, and have been “studying” roasting for a little over a year now. I had completed a few roasts on my stovetop popper and didn’t like the results, which is why I made the jump to the bullet. I fell in love with coffee roasting, and would one day, in the far future (if I could ever get good!), love to own a business with it, so I wanted a real drum roaster.
That being said, I have a decent grasp on a lot of the language, and kind of the fundamentals. I’m just having to learn how to put it into practice. It’s been fun and very rewarding so far. I’ve watched the first few episodes of Mill City’s videos. There is a lot there! It’s a little overwhelming, but I’m determined to get good at this, if nothing else than to enjoy coffee on a whole new level and save money.

Hope all is well with you!

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Hi guys,

Im new too… A friend of mine who also roasts sent me a link to his kenyan washed like “dude give this a go” type thing and i wanna give it a go but not sure when i open his recipe in roastime, how i create a recipe using his… how i import it or which trigger to use?

Any advice? Ive messaged him but he doesnt know because hes never used anyone elses profiles.

Regards,

Steve

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@goingoingonecoffeewd I think you need to save the profile in your roasts, then you can overlay or playback

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Thanks! This worked

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