Analyzing And Improving A Coffee Roast

every home coffee roaster wants to improve their roast ultimately their cup of coffee learning along the way is critical and one way we can do that is analyzing our roast and we're going to do that today so stick around [Music] all right thanks for joining me today and welcome to the virtual coffee lab we're going to be taking a closer look at roast analysis and for a home coffee roaster that really entails three or four different points the first is we're going to be looking at the roasting profile next will be the beans actually analyzing the bean itself after it's come out of the roaster and the third is we're going to be tasting the coffee and then lastly we're going to be kind of taking a step back and putting all that together and trying to determine maybe what we might do differently with the roast all right so let's start with the first point and that is the profile so the coffee that we're going to be analyzing is a sumatra coffee that came from sweet maria's sumatra asa biebsen aula i love destroying the names of these coffees when i try to pronounce them alright so this coffee has some tobacco notes some honey sweetness and some fruit accents along with some underlying chocolaty notes that's what the bag says and so it sounded great and my son bought this coffee and we've been enjoying it for the last few weeks we roasted this coffee on the mill city 500 gram roaster and we used artisan for the logging software taking a closer look at this profile you see we have a total roast time of 10 minutes and 12 seconds and a drop temperature of 400 degrees i want to focus on the phase percentages first because that's really important to me we had a 48 and a half percent dry phase a thirty four point three percent browning phase and then a seventeen point two percent development phase this is basically in the ballpark of where we wanted to roast this coffee looking for any problem issues let's start with the charge temperature 388 degrees for our roaster that's exactly where we wanted to drop this coffee the turning point was totally within norms so we wouldn't have an out of control roast or a roast that was underpowered we knew we had enough momentum to get us through the roast we hit dry end at 4 minutes and 57 seconds so far so good on the roast the decline of the rate of rise was pretty good there weren't any significant flicks or crashes anywhere we had a few rolling bumps along the way but nothing that would have really messed up the roast and when we got down to the development phase it was flat as a matter of fact you can actually see it go up a little bit and that's something that we really um didn't want we should have continued on the decline rather than having a little bit of that upturn and then ultimately the development was within a percent or two of where we wanted to drop the coffee not only can we see where our glaring mistakes were with our actual roast while we're roasting the coffee we could also learn about the behavior of the beans during the roast by looking at this roasting profile we can see if this coffee is one that really lets off a lot of moisture and gives us any sort of flicks or sudden crashes in the roast we can also determine if this coffee takes longer to go through the dry process and based on the amount of heat that we've applied to it so when we get to looking at the beans and comparing that with the rose profile we'll learn a little bit more about the coffee but there aren't any real big surprises here other than again in that development phase we i noticed that both the gas on the exhaust temperature had gone up a little bit in the middle of the development phase as well as ultimately the rate of rise you can see that increase as well so the question is was that a moisture bean energy related thing or was that a roasting error where we actually increased the heat more than we should have normally you're decreasing your energy as you progress through the roast alright so for the actual percentages of the phases these are within a percent or so maybe two percent of where we wanted to be within our gross profile there weren't any glaring hiccups or errors with what we had planned so the outcome was pretty close to what we had planned all right so the next thing that a home roaster is going to want to do is take a look at the beans that they've roasted in this case i've got this sumatra coffee here at first glance i noticed a couple of beans are lighter than all the other beans here here's one there's another over here and those might be known as quakers those would be picked out before you would grind the coffee because ultimately they could influence the flavor of the cup the beans themselves don't show really any defects or insect damage or anything like that there may be a couple of beans that look a little weird like this one here and this one with the cracks along the side but generally speaking there aren't a lot of chipped up hacked up beans or insect damaged beans that are in this bean pile here all right as far as the roast goes i am noticing some scorching where the hot surface of the drum may have caused some of these dark marks on here so you could get kind of a little bit of a roasty um taste or a slight bit of a char note in the coffee based on this yeah there's definitely some roasting defects on this roast so we're going to want to make sure that we have the drum speed turned up more so that we don't have things like this the scorching that's on here all right next what we're going to do is take a few of these beams and we're going to break them open because we want to look at the inside to see if the roast was all the way through the bean or really how the color compares between the outside and the inside of the bean all right you stick your nail on the center line of the bean pop that there is going to be a little chaff in here and we'll get that out of the way in a minute some of these are hard to get open all right you blow a little bit of the chaff away or rub it away whatever you need to do so you can get a better look at what's going on here in the bean so generally speaking other than this being here being a little darker on the inside and this looks like it could be a little bit of tipping let me get this out of the way that looks like there could have been a little bit of tipping um so that definitely could be a lot of pressure build up and a lot of heat on the inside of the bean being released pretty intense heat so i guess in general looking at these beans the inside color is not under roasted it's not super light and other than this one being i wouldn't say that it's dark either if you look at the side profile of the bean and let's see if we can do that if we look at the side profile of the bean it looks and i'll take a still shot of this it looks like it's about the same temperature or the same roast same color all the way through the bean all right and the next way that we can analyze our roast is by tasting the coffee i've seen on so many different online forums people showing pictures of the roast and they're saying you know how did i do or how does this look and that's great i mean that's that might be helpful but ultimately we need to be tasting the coffee and determining for ourselves how we can improve the roast or sharing the coffee with others and letting them provide feedback my son and i have been drinking this coffee this week and tasting it it basically hits most of the notes that are on the bag there is a chocolatey and a little bit of a tobacco note in there there is a little bit of a sweetness as well and there is a little bit of a bright acidity it's more of a citrus acidity more like a lemon type of acidity but it's not overwhelming it's not like a a pucker it's not that intense at all but it doesn't have the dried fruit note in it that could be my brewing that could be the roast i mean there could be a whole plethora of reasons why i might not be getting the the fruit and what i mean by the roast is the roast profile so the coffee tastes pretty good there were a little bit of roasty notes in it and that could be that a little bit of the scorching that we noticed in a tiny bit of the tipping so by tasting your coffee and comparing it to what it's supposed to be like looking at your profile looking at the beans and then tasting it you can start to put together the pieces of the puzzle to determine you know maybe if there's anything wrong with what you did with your roast maybe the profile itself or maybe you just need to try a different approach with the coffee but you're gonna learn that through tasting the coffee and then comparing that to what you've experienced with the profile and with the bean analysis all right and my last point is basically taking all the information that we have that we just talked about and determining how we might do things a little differently well the first glaring issue that we saw was in the profile and that is during the development phase it got flat the rate of rise should have been a consistent downward trend and that doesn't always happen for our roast so you can see in this roast it's not a perfect roast there's definitely some some issues with it so we can get better at that and that could be the behavior of the bean like i mentioned or it just could have been a mistake on the gas itself we may have just applied gas when we shouldn't have so we can learn from that we can also learn the scorching presents potentially a slow drum speed or two higher temperatures on the charge and i would air towards probably too slow of a drum speed but what i may do is adjust my charge temperature a few degrees lower and then turn up my drum speed and that way i would have a better chance of avoiding some of the scorching that we saw so my question to you is are you analyzing your roasts after the fact or are you just drinking the coffee are you taking a close look at your profile after the fact are you taking notes or a journal or something for a reference to see maybe mistakes that you've made during the roast things that you can correct the next time you roast this coffee or we haven't really covered this but let's just say that it's a beautiful roast it's perfect it's everything that you wish it could have been it was did you journal did you log did you use a roasting profile that was saved so that you can see all the good things that you did and replicate that also are you cracking the beans open looking for any sort of mistakes or anything glaring that the bean can tell us under-roasted over-roasted too high of a temperature that caused those roasting defects those are things that we can learn from by looking at the beans are you doing that and the taste are you making notes on your tasting notes that you can apply back to the next time you roast this coffee so for example the scorching that was present on some of those beans that ended up in the cup and so now we're going to be making changes to correct that roast analysis is something that not everybody's doing i don't do it all the time but it is interesting to do especially if we're trying to learn especially if we have a difficult coffee or a coffee that's behaving kind of weird and we want to figure out what's going on this is one road map one way to be able to go through our roast and try to determine what went wrong or how we would do it differently i hope this video has been helpful for you leave your comments share your thoughts if you're using any sort of a process for analyzing your roasts that you want to share leave that in the comments thank you so much for joining me today and i hope you guys have a great week roasting we'll see you next time you

Channel: Virtual Coffee Lab - Home Coffee Roaster

Views: 13,533

Keywords: how to roast coffee, roasting coffee, home coffee roasting, coffee roasting, coffee roaster, coffee roasting at home, coffee roasting basics, specialty coffee roasting, home coffee roasting for beginners, home coffee roasting tips, how to roast coffee beans, how to roast coffee beans at home, behmor 2000ab home coffee roaster, hive coffee roaster, Can I roast good coffee at home?, roast analysis, coffee roast analysis, analyzing and improving a coffee roast

Id: Oe8Nh841CiA

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022