Coffee Roasting     Roast for BT temp or development time?

2022-04-07 07:21

Roast for BT temp or development time?

When roasting to match a specific profile I frequently come into issues where the roast is running a little fast or a little slow. With all things considered, I have heard that the time spent in development will have the biggest impact on matching the profile in the cup. If say a roast hit 1st crack 1:00 early and youd like to plan on spending about 2:30 in development and drop at a BT of 401F, but you know you will hit 401F before 2:30, would an experienced roaster plan on dropping at the desired BT or go more for development time?

My gut instinct says to try and modify the roast by lowering gas in development and try to lower ROR to get the most time possible in development and rely more on dropping at BT.

I have included my 2 roasts for reference if interested.

https://portal.roastpath.com/publicroasts/index/2812853071700250322

https://portal.roastpath.com/publicroasts/index/6130987081200070422

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2022-04-07 08:36

Your finish temp will have the greatest impact on flavor. Development time has marginally less impact, but one minute shorter development on a light or medium roasted coffee will usually result in raw inner seed development producing thin, vegetal, and/or sour coffee.

Slow the roast and get as close to your time/temp target as possible. If you have to, shut off the burners and coast. If that doesn't do it, bump your air.

If you are so catastrophically off the rails (50-60+ seconds) that even this won't work, let the finish temp creep a couple of degrees while you get closer to your development time target. Maybe 403-4 finish instead of 401. Think of it as "splitting the difference"

These ideas are relative to the coffee. Small seeds need less development time. Dense seeds need more. etc.

Document this stuff and, if possible, blind cup your coffees. This exercise has the potential to show you a lot you didn't know about coffee and you'll be happily surprised when a "recovered" roast turns out better than your previous production "ideal".

This happens often enough and is frequently mysterious enough to have been one of the big reasons we developed RP in the first place. We simply wanted to give production roasters a place to exchange ideas beyond the simplistic and formulaic make believe "roast science" people are not infrequently burdened with as the "right" way to roast.

Thank you for posting the question.

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