Hi all,
Seeking advise and wisdom in roasting Ethiopian green beans (Natural sun dried). I have taken a crack at this but I am not happy with the outcome. in terms of flavor Please help/comment if I am doing this right.
Fyi - I have tried the soaking method of letting it soak for 1:30 mins in the bullet before ramping up the power.
There is another thread that might offer you some insight into Ethiopian naturals:
Hi, could you provide a little bit on why you’re not happy with the result? How did the roast cup?
A couple of basic things you can do:
1- Up the preheat to 270-280. Too slow in the green side.
2- Soak it for 30-45 seconds. 1:30m is excessive. You don’t have loring with huge amounts of heat that you can add.
3- Start with P8 after the soak… you are hitting P9 now just to compensate with the wasted soak. Prior to 150’c or yellowing drop it to P7. For light roasts I usually play around P2-P3 prior to the crack. Your RoR at the end is like 7.5. usually when I drop it is around 3-5.
4- Try to keep F2 fan until the yellowing point. Water vapor is very valuable in making the drum atmosphere more uniform. On washed coffees I like to remove a bit of it since washed usually has higher water humidity but you roasting a natural (which I don’t know any specifics) so you gonna need to try both approches. F2 until yellowing and F3 from the get go.
5- You can try D7 instead of D9. D9 if you aren’t modulating drum speed is usually used for 800g+ roasts. I modulate my drum speed from D4 until it reaches D9 prior to FC. Got better results. You can try that.
I am in terms of taste with the Ethiopian. It’s just ok but I believe it can be much better than what it is currently.
thanks so much for sharing me this link
sounds like a good strategy, i will try this later today with hopes that I can replicate a good result. soo insightful
otaibimn had a lot of good advice and I would agree with it. I try to keep time to yellow between 3-5 minutes. You can soak at a power setting like P4 so you still have energy going into the roast without it being to much. And F3 that early isn’t helping, wait till yellow. I’ve had good results with the pyramid approach on delicate Ethiopian naturals. Do something like P6-P7-P8-P7-P6, with your peak somewhere in the first half of the Maillard phase.
Personally I keep drum speed consistent through out the roast, just adjusting to the batch size, higher speed for larger batch. But haven’t tried adjusting during roast, so can’t argue with someone else’s results.
Another thought here is ‘when’ you are cupping. I’ve been roasting dry process Ethiopians almost exclusively for the past year or so, and without exception I haven’t found one that didn’t begin to reach its full potential until having rested for a minimum of 4 days. My most recent roast has taken a full 7 days before it started to fully exhibit those marvelous berry/fruit/sweet/cocoa notes that Ethiopians are famous for.
Waiting, is always the hardest part. I’m certainly guilty of making changes to my roast strategy before giving a bean time to rest properly. The patience required to test out new espresso roasts kills me!
I’ve roasted some pretty good Yirgacheffe (Ethiopia) and have to agree with the need for a lengthy rest- keeps getting better and better. Storing the roasted beans in the fridge seems to significantly slow that rest process. I’ve had much better results letting the roasted beans rest at/near room temp.
Related, I’m roasting the Yirgacheffe about 10-30 seconds into 2C which I label a Dark roast (based on Roast Vision scale- not the usual C/C+/FC/…). I’ve convinced myself that the longer the roast, the longer the time needed to rest.
Bruce
