Is gas the roasting nirvana?

Roasting on the Bullet
15

I found some time today to roast on the Bullet, using 454g batches and preheating the drum to 230C as suggested above. I had intended to do only one batch, but since the results were so disappointing I did two others. The first batch, unfortunately, was the beans I was hoping to learn how to roast on this roaster. These are Ethiopian DP Humbula Beku (?SP) recently sourced from SM and Coffeeshrub (may still be on their list, I don’t know). The first crack, at least, is basically inaudible so I went with my most usual onset 1st crack temperature from my Diedrich IR-1 Roaster, which is around 375 F. I took the beans to 419F, which where I usually end my roasts, which on the Diedrich, at least with the beans I use and at my altitude for the Diedrich is around 5850 feet of elevation (1783 meters). This is normally at the end of 1st crack but before onset of 2nd.

Ethiopian DP Humbela Buku 454g 5/24/2020

The end product weighed 371g, for a loss in excess of 18%

I should add at this point that I have never had a good roast product (to my taste) where the weight loss from roasting has been less than 15%, or more than 17%, or 16% +/- 1%. That doesn’t mean that every roast with a loss in this range is good, but rather that a weight loss of 16% +/-1% is a necessary but not sufficient requirement, at least for espresso. Perhaps if I roasted coffee for use other than as espresso, or if I preferred really darkly roasted beans, I’d have a different set of parameters.

After this experience I decided to tack on a couple of extra roasts. I have an unrelated real estate business relationship with a fellow who owns a coffee roasting business that I have never frequented and about which I have no opinion. I happened to meet up with him this past week and he gave me a tour of his roasting plant and once he knew that I roast my own coffee, he gave me a couple of pounds of 3 different green coffees in his inventory. I know nothing about these particular coffees and have never tasted them roasted by his hands. So I have no expectations, good or bad, about what I might accomplish with these beans. I decided to roast two of them, if for no other reason than to get a little bit more experience with the Bullet.

The next bean I roasted was his Guatemalan Mira Linda, which was obviously wet processed. I decided to take it to a lower temperature based upon the weight loss I got from the Ethiopian DP coffee above. I terminated the roast at 415 F, which is only 4 degrees F short of what I took the first Ethiopian to. This coffee lost 13.6% of it’s weight (starting weight 454g, ending weight 392g), which was similarly unsatisfactory in my view. Here’s the roast:

It was kind of astonishing to me that 4 degrees F, perhaps 30 seconds of a roast at the end, could change the weight loss from roasting so much. Of course, it is a different bean, so we may be comparing apples to oranges.

The third roast was an Ethiopian Sidamo, not otherwise specified, which was obviously WP by appearance. I decided to split the difference in final roast temperature, so I took it to about 417 F. This coffee roast product weighed 385g, or a weight loss from roasting of 15.2%, which would put it into my self-defined potentially acceptable range. Once again, it’s a different bean and comparisons among these 3 roasts might be fraught with potential error.

Here’s the roast profile:

https://roast.world/r/sc_JQx5e0RPHX2Bxx6We2

I haven’t done this sort of an experiment with my Diedrich, but I would be surprised if a difference of 4 degrees F among 3 roasts, from 415F to 419 F, which would take 30 seconds, maybe, would produce a range of weight losses from roasting between 13.6 and 18.3%. That just seems huge to me.

What seems much more likely to me is that the thermometry I’m observing is not reflecting the reality of what is going on in these coffee beans I am roasting. Perhaps the bean temp measurement is not accurate for the way that I roast. Perhaps I am being too “hands on” in my roasting, trying to control the heating element and the fan with fine control that looks like I’m accomplishing something but in fact it is all observational noise, i.e. the signal to noise ratio is not good.

One thing that was obvious however is that preheating the drum to 230C definitely made the roasts go faster than they did before when i preheated to around 180 C. These roasts all finished about a minute to 90 seconds faster than my typical roasts on the Diedrich, which doesn’t necessarily make them bad, just different.

I will start to taste these coffees on Day 2, 2 days from now. My assumption is that the first and 2nd will be nearly undrinkable, and that the last might be drinkable if the coffee used was worth roasting, something I don’t know at this point.

If anyone has any comments on this flight of ideas, they are welcomed, and thanks in advance!

16

Hi Ken,

We’ve had a lot of discussion recently about whether the Rao RoR curve best suits the hardware/scale/technology of the Bullet compared to the hulky machines :wink:

But from my perspective (and I don’t hold that out as an authority view) common to all your profiles is a huge loss of momentum just after a flick around FC. It looks like the combination of dropping power and ramping the fan way up may be to blame. Again maybe this is something that differs in the hardware. Do you need to pilot a yacht different to a speedboat ? Does a Cessna handle like a 747 ?

I would suggest cutting back on the maximum fan speed and drop the power a little before FC to reduce the drastic cliff. Then after FC, in combination with a less drastic fan increase, don’t drop the power out as low (P2). Induction is more responsive that plain electric elements and the thermal mass of the Bullet is lower so it probably recovers a little quicker but it may not be as fast as your Diedrich gas. So try and think a minute ahead. I would also separate out the power drop and fan increase so they don’t coincide. Give them 20-30 seconds breathing room.

As I think someone else already said, it’s probably best to develop a modified roasting style for the Bullet. Certainly it was something I had to reset after spending some time coming from a Behmor and then a HotTop. I burned through some coffee learning/observing the what ifs. And just because you have lots of things to twiddle, doesn’t mean you need to. You may want to drop the drum speed a tad to D7 or D8 with the 450g charge.

As they said on that great coffee show Galaxy Quest, never give up, never surrender…

17

Hi Stuart,

I think what it comes down to is whether or not the temperatures one gets on the Bullet (I’ve been using “bean temp,” but there is also IBTS) are accurate, or if not accurate, at least consistent. If the temperatures are in fact accurate and/or consistent, it shouldn’t matter at all how you get them. There are a limited number of parameters you can change with any roaster, not all of which are present in every roaster.

These are:

(1) Charge Temperature;
(2) Charge Weight;
(3) Heat Input;
(4) Ventilation.

Some of these may be fixed in some more limited roasting setups, especially the ventilation.

Other than for such things as chaff elimination, it shouldn’t matter one whiff whether you effect a change on the temperature in the roasting chamber via increasing/decreasing ventilation, vs. decreasing/increasing heat input. The only change I can think of where this might matter would be in a hypothetical situation where smoke isn’t being evacuated from the roasting chamber and that the excess smoke might effect the taste of the resulting beans. I have no knowledge that this is true in any roaster, but I guess it is possible.

Obviously, you do not want to stall the roast, although I have yet to read a precise definition of what constitutes “stalling a roast.” The idea is that you want the temperature to continue to increase throughout the roast; if you do that, you aren’t stalling the roast. Now you might “flatten” the coffee by taking too long to roast it, otherwise called “baking” the coffee. You also might roast the coffee too quickly, which can certainly make it unsuitable for use in espresso, and at some point unusable for any brewing method.

What I am doing with the fan and the heating element is very much intentional, because I am trying to slow down the roasting process once first crack commences, from what it would normally be if you were to proceed with the same heat input and ventilation you used to get to the beginning of first crack. I’ll link to an ancient online post I participated in eons ago that explain the philosophy at the end of this overly long post. There are others but they all state the same idea.

The funny thing about the comment on needing to anticipate what the roaster is doing in advance is almost a joke (to me) when it comes to the Bullet; in comparison to what I am used to, driving the Bullet is like driving a speedboat; roasting on my Diedrich, is more akin to piloting an oil tanker. You need to think 2 minutes ahead, minimum, with the Diedrich because it has so much thermal mass and so much power that there is a long delay between your input changes and actual changes made to the roast progression. With the Bullet, I find that you can stop it on a dime; the fan and heating element are very responsive compared to what I am used to.

The reason why I try to slow down the roast once 1st Crack commences, is that I want to get 4-5 minutes more roasting time in before the roast is terminated, and I do not (intentionally) roast beyond the end of first crack. This is because blind tasting experiments I did with another forum participant (Jim Schulman) on HB were absolutely definitive in the effect that this has on roasting coffee for espresso. I have been responsible for a number of blind tasting experiments related to coffee back in the days when I used to post online on coffee sites (not for the last 6 or more years). Most blind tasting experiments are rather confusing and often hard to pick out differences between the conditions being tested. In this case, the other taster and I could pick out coffee roasted with intervals of 2.5 minutes after onset FC, vs. 4 minutes, 100% of the time. That’s absolutely astounding. Just compare it to any blind tasting you might have done at some point with wine. It’s incredible. It’s a real difference in taste.

I can’t find the original post we made on this experiment, but it is discussed on this page:

Ancient HB Thread

So that’s why I’m doing what I am doing after onset FC. I’ve successfully done it for a number of years on an old 1lb knockoff Probat sample roaster, and another 9+ years on my Diedrich. I can’t think of any reason why you couldn’t do this on the Bullet as well.

For me it comes down to whether I can believe the thermometry on the Bullet, and if so it shouldn’t matter how I get the profiles I do. When I first got my original 1lb sample roaster, I had to hack it repeatedly to get a thermocouple into the right spot to be both reliable and repeatable; once accomplished, I could do whatever I wanted with the heat input and the results followed the thermometry, not the heat input.

If I can’t believe the thermometry on the Bullet, then I need to find some formulaic manner of roasting with it and just consider the thermometry to be an imprecise indication of where I am in the roast. I haven’t yet figured out which of these things is the truth.

18

Hi Ken

We’ve come a long way in this thread from the starting point “is gas better” haven’t we.

I don’t disagree that IMHO the Bullet responds very quickly and more nimbly than your average electric roaster, like the aforementioned Behmor or HotTop. I appreciate compared to the average production roaster those things appear like toys. But we all got to start somewhere. Mine was a FreshRoast SR500 about five years ago because an Amazon Gift card was burning a hole in my wallet.

So I’d suggest that one of the reasons the Bullet can stop on a dime is partly the induction heating and partly the fact that it isn’t lugging an oil tankers worth of thermal mass around. So that said it’s no surprise to me that if you throw out a boat anchor that is P2 at the same time as cranking the fan up to F7, the graph is going to show what it shows. You jammed on the brakes when a squirrel ran out on the road. You didn’t slow anything down that I can see, you came to a dead stop - driving the 18 wheeler, the squirrel would be an ex-squirrel. But the Bullet doesn’t carry that level of thermal mass AFAIK.

Now I agree, does that necessarily mean the coffee tastes bad ? I don’t know. You say so.
But you have repeated the same experiment a few times and so far I think you said the coffee was less than drinkable. The fact that your graph shows similar signatures each time you repeated the same behaviour, to me implies the Bullet is recording consistently. They all show the same “signature”. So you now know what bad coffee looks like. Change one or two variables and see how the coffee tastes then look at the graph. I wasn’t saying that getting a Rao RoR 10 was going to fix your bad coffee. There are some who would argue a perfect curve equals the best coffee QED. Maybe such a perfect curve on the Dietrich gives you the coffee you seek. I wouldn’t know. If you’re able to share a graph from Artisan on a good Dietrich roast, I’d be very interested to see it.

Full disclosure, I don’t roast for espresso, I’m a pour over guy.

@jacob do you want to throw in some observations and rationale on the IBTS vs the rest of the world ?

19

Hi Stuart,

My Diedrich IR-1 was one of the first few produced, and for a short while they did not require the purchase of the electronics package with the roaster, which would have greatly increased its cost. I did not get the electronics package and have no way to easily log my roasts. I operate the roaster entirely manually, adjusting the gas input and the damper, in response to the displayed bean temp from the TC in the middle of the drum; the damper controls where the airflow goes, either 20:80 to drum:cooling tray, 50:50 to the drum:cooling tray, or 80:20 to the drum:cooling tray.

When I roast on the Diedrich I do more or less exactly what my logged roasts on the Bullet show, with the caveat that one has to anticipate far out with the Diedrich, hence the gas input is declining over the last minute before onset FC, and then massively reduced once the FC starts. The temps flatten out a bit more slowly on the Diedrich, but the roasting temp curves are fairly similar to what I’ve posted here with the Bullet.

Part of my observed results probably have to do with the specific Ethiopian Bean I have been roasting (mostly) in the Bullet. The beans are tiny, the smallest I’ve ever roasted from any origin, the FC is entirely inaudible to my hearing on either roaster, and the flavors in the roasted bean are quite unique, extremely fruity and complex. When roasted well, which I have accomplished every time on my Diedrich, the espresso shots are among the best I have ever had. I did roast another Ethiopian DP coffee in the Bullet once and the results were actually pretty good. The roasting profile would have been more or less the same as what I have posted here for the other coffees. Unfortunately, I have had intermittent problems with the Roast Time software, and that particular roast was not saved. I should probably roast a few others in my stash of Ethiopians I know to see if it is just this particular bean (Humbela Buku) I’m having trouble with.

20

Hi Ken -

Since I don’t have anything close to your experience with large scale roasting I wasn’t going to jump in here, but we do have one thing in common: a new V2 Bullet. Mine is from the spring 2020 batch from SM. So here are a couple of suggestions, take or leave as you see fit:

I’ve learned that drum and fan speeds don’t necessarily correlate to older Bullets, so take care when comparing and trying to reproduce other’s profiles. My calibrated F3 fan shows 1080 rpm on the Info panel, which corresponds to about F6 uncalibrated, which you might get with older machines. I initially made the mistake of assuming I was using calibrated fan settings, but the display in menu showed “—” not “PPd” so I had run the calibration procedure but not activated it. Similarly, my D9 drum speed is 74 rpm (measured by marking the drum shaft and counting with a stopwatch).

The point of this is that a very cool feature of the Bullet is that we’re supposed to be able to share roast profiles. Mostly by luck, I managed a truly fantastic roast of the Ethiopian Organic Dry Process Sidama Keramo from SM which you can see here:

If you are lucky enough to have any of those wonderful beans, in theory, you should be able to download that profile, see it appear in your Roast Time list, and replay it on your machine.

Since you mentioned Hambela, I also roasted a pretty tasty Ethiopian Dry Process Hambela Buku 13 Screen from SM here (although next time around I’d drop it a few degrees C earlier):

The only other suggestion I’d dare offer is that the IRBT temperature sensor seems very valuable. First crack temperatures seem very repeatable, even across different batch sizes where the bean probe temps don’t match. So I’ve been focusing on IRBT when anticipating FC events and setting recipe actions.

Hope this helps!

  • Brad
21

Brad, your Control settings are similar to what I use, and resulting profiles, too, although I usually drop around 205 for DP, occasionally to 210. I’m gonna check to see if that Sidama Keramo is still available.

I have a v1.5 and the calibrated fan shows about 1074 at F3. I’ve never checked drum speed, and don’t vary it during roasts, at least not advanced to that point, yet.

22

Ken,

As someone mentioned, there has been a lot of discussion of how some of the “RAO principles” may or may not apply to the Bullet. And of course he is but one expert of many with his own experience and expertise, but he is arguably one of the most well known and cited amongst the home roasting community. Whether or not you subscribe to his views in a fairly recent blog post he has tried to provide some clarity to some of the more popular ones that get misinterpreted.

One of which is that long roasts create baked flavors, he believes that it is a sharp ROR crash that creates baked flavors. Unless there is something weird with the scaling on your graphs or the way they are presented online, to me all of your roasts look like they crash at first crack. Of course could be my interpretation as well, but perhaps something you may want to rule out. I realizie that you were not necessarily complaining of baked flavors, but the crash could be having an adverse affect none the less.

For reference:

23

Hi Brad,

Thanks for your post and associated roast profile graphs. When I look at your profiles what I see are very short roasts that have around 2 minutes between the reported onset of FC and the end of the roast. In my own repeated and tested experience on two commercial quality roasters (1lb Probat knockoff sample roaster; Diedrich IR-1), this will not produce a satisfactory result with single origin Ethiopians used for espresso. It might well be great for brewed coffee used in other ways. And of course that is my subjective opinion, but I have tested it in blinded comparison testing with simultaneously prepared and tasted shots, many of them. The length of the interval after onset of FC is in my opinion critical, and ~2 minutes is very insufficient.

Are you using this coffee for straight espresso shots? If used in other brewing methods or in milk drinks, the results I describe may not be apparent.

ken

24

Thanks very much for this article link, which I will look over later. I don’t know anything about Scott Rao, who certainly could be very knowledgeable about roasting.

I’m kind of an idiot savant type roaster; I only roast Ethiopians, mostly DP, and I only use them for espresso. Not all Ethiopians are suitable for use as single origin espresso so I only buy the ones identified as being suitable. I’ve found Tom at SM/Coffeeshrub to be pretty reliable on that determination, which is not to say that I love love love every Ethiopian he so-identifies.

Most coffees roasted for espresso are obviously blends of one sort or another. Most coffee that is roasted is not used in espresso, but if used in espresso, it is generally camouflaged into very large milk drinks. Now I do make a cappuccino every morning, but I believe that the milk dulls your ability to perceive important differences in the underlying espresso, so I don’t roast for cappuccino use, specifically. If I did I’d probably roast darker than I do.

I tend to discount broad sweeping conclusions about coffee roasting, because it isn’t clear to me that you should roast the same way for different brew methods. Different coffees also vary a lot in terms of how they roast. I can also state that I would put my straight shots up against anyone’s; I’ve tasted a lot of straight shots made from a lot of different coffees in a lot of venues over the years, and I like mine better than any I’ve been served elsewhere. Of course, that could just be puffery.

I did used to send out samples of my roast product periodically to people I know in the coffee community, and no one ever said that they thought my coffees were “baked.” I don’t believe they are “baked” for the intended usage. I would say that I have used my coffees for brewed/pourover coffee on occasion and I don’t much care for them, but then I don’t much care for brewed coffee in the first place. I’m not ready to buy into the notion that extending out the duration of FC to ~4-5 minutes produces coffee that is baked or has baked flavors when used for straight espresso shots, certainly not with the Ethiopians I roast.

Getting back to my original point – and this might be germane to the discussion, is that I believe that I am slowing down the roasts on the bullet more rapidly than is even possible on my Diedrich; again, the “piloting an oil tanker” vs a speedboat analogy might be apt. Even though I do cut the heat dramatically and increase the ventilation from ~50% through the drum to 80% on that roaster (Diedrich) at onset of FC, that roaster doesn’t respond as quickly as the Bullet does. So, what I might be doing is taking a nimble roaster like the Bullet and acting like I’m using a roaster that doesn’t respond quickly, so perhaps that’s the issue.

Which gets back to the “sharp ROR crash” point you make in your post. The total time I spend roasting the coffee after onset FC may be the same on the Bullet as on the Diedrich, but on the Bullet I may be making the change from rapid rise to tapered rise more abruptly and that may be an/the issue. I need to consider this the next time I roast and see how that comes out.

25

Agreed Ken, I think the agility of the Bullet to pull up short is at work here. Applying the front handbrake on a speeding motorbike is going to throw you over the handlebars, to drag in another analogy :wink:

26

Sorry to be monopolizing this thread, which I have intruded on in the middle . . . .

Just a note on why I am so adamant on the concept of having a long enough interval between onset FC and the end of the roast, specifically if one is roasting for straight shot espresso use.

My original “commercial” roaster was 500g/1lb sample roaster which was a knockoff of an old Probat sample roaster. It was purchased from roastersexchange.com which later became US Roasters Corp (maybe because the old name looked more like a gender reassignment office than a coffee roaster manufacturer). I had to modify by replacing the burner which was inadequate, and hacking in a thermocouple into the middle of the drum. Once I got this more or less perfected, I roasted hundreds of pounds of coffee annually on it, ultimately settling on single origin espresso and later concentrating on Ethiopians. The roast product coming out of this roaster was used in a bunch of blinded comparison tasting tests which were used to evaluate such things as the impact of pump type (rotary vs. vibratory) on espresso shots, the effects of freezing coffee, and even on roast profiles, the issue of roast profiling especially the duration of the roast after onset FC. There were a number of people who tasted the shots, generally in a blinded fashion.

As I stated earlier, one thing we tested blindly was the effect of the duration of FC after its onset, and we found that this was an easily discernible difference in that coffee roasted with only 2 or 2.5 minutes between onset of FC to end of the roast were grossly inferior for straight shots when compared to coffee roasted with a longer interval from onset FC to end of roast. All of this was documented contemporaneously on home-barista.com.

Fast forward to when I bought my Diedrich roaster in 2011. I spent a couple of hours at the Diedrich factory with Stephen Diedrich, who demonstrated my new roaster to me, and told me how he roasts coffee and the profiles he uses. His recommended profile is a slow ramp up to onset FC with a rapid finish, in about 2 minutes, which is at least somewhat similar to some profiles posted in this thread.

I tried this profile repeatedly on the Diedrich with the coffees I was using at the time on my old Probat knockoff sample roaster. I found the results to be horrible for straight shot espresso usage, very grossly inferior to what I had been obtaining with my far less sophisticated sample roaster. I tore my hair out over this, played around with the profiles and still couldn’t get satisfactory results for espresso straight shots.

At this point I decided to try to replicate my earlier results from the sample roaster onto the Diedrich. I was able to replicate the same profiles with some experimentation, and voila, the results were again excellent. So what I learned from this is that the profile is more important than the roaster itself, assuming decent roasters, of course.

My error in transposing this profile, with which I have 15 years+ experience, onto the Bullet, is perhaps that I am slowing down the roast on the Bullet too quickly right after onset of FC; that hasn’t been something I could do if I wanted to do it on my other roasters, but with the Bullet it is easily done. So perhaps that’s the error in what I’ve been doing with the Bullet.

I would suggest to those of you who do enjoy straight espresso shots and who roast for that usage, to consider a little experimentation on your own – forget about Scott Rao and any other gurus out there, just do this little experiment with your own roaster and your own taste buds. Slow down the roast after onset FC; maybe not as quickly as I have done on the graphs I posted, but slow it down slow enough that you can extend FC out to last at least 3.5 minutes, preferably 4 minutes, but not more than 5 minutes. Hit FC before the 10 minute mark (9.5 minutes would be better), and keep your total roast time below 15 minutes (preferably 14 minutes).

Make some straight shots after you’ve rested the coffee 2 or 3 days and continue to taste the coffee over a period of 7-10 days post roast date. Compare these shots to what you have been producing with your faster profiles that don’t give you that “magic” 3.5 to 4 minute interval after onset of FC.

I’d be willing to bet that most of you, maybe all of you, will see what I’m talking about here and will see the improvement in your roast product. The difference is NOT subtle, it’s enormous, and the coffee will not taste baked to you.

27

Hey Ken,

It’s all good, there are a few Rebel Alliance folks here who question The Curve. As I said, I have no beef with you wanting to extend the time from FC to drop to however long you wish so that your coffee tastes good to you for your extraction method. There may well be a different approach needed for single origin Ethiopian in espresso. As you noted, many espresso beans are in fact blends. And part of the “rebel cause” is tail wagging the dog - does a mathematically perfect curve dictate greatest coffee, which seems to be a quest that new (Bullet) roasters aspire to. I’m not sure it does.

I think as you say, the takeaway here is that the reduced thermal mass of the Bullet can lead you to come to a screeching halt and lose the momentum you built up with your slow ramp up to FC.

I have had drops that were 3:00 or 3:30 after FC started and the coffee was great to my tastes. I don’t think I have ventured out as far as 4:00 but then I also don’t tend to need/want a darker roast that may be required to cut through milk based espresso drinks vs straight espresso.

28

Hi Stuart,

I don’t roast into second crack; I always end the roast either at the end of FC or just before that. I don’t consider that to be a “darker” roast. My double shots are made from about 15g of coffee by weight, and the extracted espresso shots weigh about 30g.

That’s not an extraction designed to put into a ton of cow juice.

If one were intending to roast into 2nd crack, then getting a longer interval after onset FC would be much easier. Since I don’t ever roast that darkly (at least not intentionally), I have no idea what impact that would have on the taste.

ken

29

It’s day 2 since I roasted the 3 coffees with the profiles I posted, so I thought I would try them.

The first one was Ethiopian DP Humbela Buku, which turned out darker than I would have liked and with an 18+% weight loss from roasting. Although more roasted than is my preference, it actually tasted pretty good:

https://roast.world/r/og5AoWgP4lVQtBiVUiyd0

Second was a WP Ethiopian Sidamo, not otherwise specified, given to me by a coffee roaster owner I know. The roast level was within my target range and the weight loss was about 15.2% Although not as complex as most of the Ethiopians I buy and roast, it was actually pretty good today.

Third on the list was a Guatemalan, also supplied by the roaster acquaintance. It was under roasted and the weight loss from roasting was only about 13%. This was one of the worst coffees I have ever tasted, worse than airplane coffee, and I spit it out into the sink without swallowing any of it.

As pointed out earlier in this thread, all of my three posted profiles resemble each other in terms of the slope of the curve right after onset of FC. It’s possible that the Guatemalan was “baked,” hard to tell with something that tastes that bad. As for the other two, they aren’t baked, and they don’t taste flat, again, as used for straight shots of espresso.

30

I fairly regularly roast a Red Sea blend (Ethiopian and Yemen) and it invariably needs to lie undisturbed after roasting for a few days before showing its true colours. In fact most of my Ethiopians I leave for at least three or four days to get their act together.

Maybe you just don’t care for Guatemalans as I have friends who can’t abide Ethiopian coffee :wink:

It has been an educational discussion and I thank all for their participation :slight_smile:

31

Like you, I don’t generally consume coffee until it has reached the 3 day point, however I find that I can taste it objectively at 2 days.

I don’t know anything about the Guatemalan since it was given to me as a gift. I think it was so under roasted as to be unpalatable, especially in an espresso shot.

ken

32

Since I am only at the house with the Bullet part-time, my ability to roast on it is limited. I did do a few roasts on the Bullet last week, which I will post here:

Dry Processed Ethiopian

Wet Processed Ethiopian Sidamo

In both of these roasts I was able to reduce the speed of the ROR drop off from what I posted earlier, while still extending the roast out 4 minutes+ into first crack, without actually entering 2nd crack, which was my goal and the roasting profile I’ve been using successfully on 2 different gas roasters over the last 10+ years.

The results were pretty good, however I’m not terribly famiiar with either of the coffees and haven’t roasted the WP coffee ever on my Diedrich, and have only roasted one batch of the DP coffee on the Diedrich, which was months ago.

Sorry, no answer to the bigger question posed by this thread, as to whether “gas roasting” is better than electric, but at least I seem to be beyond the disappointing results I was having some of the time with the Bullet. Based on the limited number of roasts done, and the fact that I was the only taster, I would be very reluctant to ascribe any of this to avoiding an early “ROR crash” or much anything else.

33

I finally had the chance to do a roasting session on my Diedrich IR-1 yesterday, after a 3 month pause, mostly to be out of my main residence during the height of the coronavirus pandemic (it having been located in what was a “hot spot”). One of my justifications for buying the Bullet for my “business house” was that I was going to be stuck there for a while during the epidemic. I will also use this post as an attempt to get back to the original topic of this thread.

Yesterday I roasted 2, 2lb batches, of each of 3 different DP Ethiopians, for espresso, on the Diedrich, for a total of 6 back to back roasts, all taken to around 419 F bean temp on the Diedrich, which with that roaster at my altitude of about 5850 ft means the coffee makes it through 1st crack almost to the end but doesn’t enter 2nd crack. First crack was generally started around 375 F, after about 9 minutes 30 seconds, and then the roast was carried on for 4 to 4 mins 30 seconds further after which the beans were dumped.

As is my practice for many years, once I get within 10 degrees F of initiating FC, I reduce the gas heat input, and once FC actually starts, I further reduce the gas input to a great extent, plus change the ventilation to 80% through the drum (maximum you can get with the damper in this roaster). Once the rate of rise (ROR) slows precipitously, I gingerly increase the gas heat input and reduce the ventilation through the drum also, the latter only if needed. I paid particular attention to the bean temps over the next ~4 minutes of each roast, until the beans were dumped.

Unfortunately, I do not have any way to record the bean temps in real time or to put them on a graph, as the thermocouple in the drum goes to a digital read out but there is no way to interface with it as the roaster does not have an “electronics package.” Nonetheless, it is pretty easy to describe what happens as it is consistent and repeatable across all of the roasts I did with the 3 different coffees yesterday.

Once FC starts on this roaster, the bean temperature rises very rapidly as the roast becomes self-supporting, or “exothermic.” Even with the gas heat turned down to a minimum (in my case this is going down from a maximum of around 6.75 WC (Water Column Inches) to 2.0 WC, e.g. reducing the gas input by more than 2/3, plus increasing the drum ventilation from 50% to 80%, the beans very rapidly go from ~375F to 395F in the space of about 1.5 minutes. This is at least as fast a ROR as the beans are going through in the minute or two before the FC starts, although perhaps a bit slower than the ROR earlier on in the roast. Only after about 1.5 minutes of greatly reducing heat input and increasing drum ventilation, does the ROR slow considerably, and in some cases it slows down A LOT.

As I have mentioned earlier on in my posts on this thread, I intentionally slow my roasts down after onset FC to draw them out to 4-5 minutes after onset FC, which I have found works well for single origin Ethiopians used for espresso. I had some roasts with poor results on the Bullet attempting this profile, however it is now fairly obvious to me that what happened on the Bullet is not what happens on the Diedrich with the strategy I employ.

On the Bullet, whose drum doesn’t have a great deal of “thermal mass,” when you cut the heat input and you increase the fan speed, you get an almost immediate response in the “rate of rise” ROR, whereas in the Diedrich IR-1, this is delayed by about 1.5 minutes to my observation. So, IF the “ROR crash” as quoted here from Scott Rao is in fact a real detriment to the quality of some roasts, it also probably matters WHEN that ROR crash occurs. From my own informal observations on the Bullet, it seems that if the ROR crash occurs right after onset of FC, this is not good for roast quality. IF the ROR crash occurs later, in this case delayed by about 1.5 minutes, then it does not have the same effect.

Finally, bringing this back to the original topic of this thread started by Stuart: I would not compare roasting on the Bullet to roasting on a high-thermal-mass gas roaster. You may very well be able to obtain similar results, but the experience is totally different. The gas roaster is presumably designed to roast in a certain way, which the thermal mass of the drum dictates. It’s kind of like driving a Sherman Tank through a blizzard; you don’t need to overthink things, the tank is going to keep on going its way and nothing on the ground is going to stop it. The Bullet, on the other hand, is nimble and more like a sports car with summer tires on it, you can make it do what you want it to do, but that is going to take a lot of attention on your part. A commercial gas roaster is a very solid piece of equipment; the Bullet, in comparison, feels rather flimsy. One advantage of the Bullet is that at least in theory you could find a good profile and then just execute the whole profile automatically through the software. There are certainly big gas commercial roasters that can do that also, but you are talking an enormous amount of money for a gas roaster that can do that.

On the whole, I much prefer the Diedrich gas roaster to the Bullet, however I am more used to it, and I can’t say that with experience the Bullet isn’t capable of getting very similar results.

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Hi Brad
I tried tracking down your Ethiopia Organic Dry Sidamo profile from this old post

but it is no longer available (to me anyway). Is it this one? Ethiopia DPSK: C+ from 24 April 2020?

Looking for some variation to my Sidamo roasts so far and keen to explore yours and Kens suggestions.
Cheers