How Coffee Roasting Temperatures Are Helpful

whether you're new to home coffee roasting or you've been doing this for a long time you're probably referencing temperatures temperatures are an important piece of data and we're going to be talking today about what we should be doing with that information and how it's going to help us roast great coffee so stick [Music] around all right thanks for joining me to today and welcome to the virtual coffee lab this is my third video in a foundational series I guess I'll call it the secret sauce of roasting coffee there's no real secret sauce all of these are really important elements and steps as we roast coffee at home or whether you're doing it for a living and I've been slowly introducing Concepts in a progression along the way uh Jay one of our viewers here on the channel he kind of picked up on that on that last video um thanks for watching Jay and yes I intend to use all of my different Coffee Roasters during this video um series and the progression So today we're focusing on coffee roasting temperatures last week we talked about uh heat management and we used one single variable and that was heat over time and then in my very first video we used a hot a popcorn popper which really is an entrylevel roasting device that has no control unless you modify it so yes we are progressing today we're going to be focusing on times and we're going to be roasting on the beore I chose the beore today because it is it's a great roaster number one it's it's probably one of the most significant contributions to the home coffee roasting hobby that I can think of uh it's been around for a long time and it is a fully capable roster uh I like it it because it really has two variables um technically there's more variables you can use charge weight as a variable but it basically has heat where you can alter the power setting on the roster and there is a air fan that kicks on in kind of an automatic mode depending upon the size of the roast you're doing we'll get into that in just a minute but we're going to be roasting on the beore we're going to be using that single variable heat and then we're going to be talking about temperatures that occur during our roast progression and how we should interpret those now I I'm G to I'm not going to say you need to be at this temperature at this time because I can't I can't do that because my roster is unique I have a certain amount of power that's coming out of the wall my cord is a certain length and my the basement that I'm roasting in here has a certain temperature and even if you had the same model model B more that I had our temperatures are going to vary in this comparison that you would try to make and do the exact same thing that I do so we teach in Concepts we talk about things in a way that we can all relate to and so as you read your temperatures you'll be able to understand and interpret how this applies we're going to get the roast started right now you'll notice that I'm using a timer this is the coffee roasting Timer app this app is free it's browser based so it's really not an app I keep calling it an app but it's basically a something you can use in a browser on your tablet uh on your phone and it's free to use it basically allows you to record uh first crack as well as drop and also your um weights before and after the roast so you can determine moisture loss and and we'll do that here in this video all right so we've started the roast and immediately the drum starts to turn and the beans start moving around in the drum and every 30 seconds or so I plan to check the temperature and Mark it here so on the left you'll see me writing down the time as well as the temperature now just a little uh transparency here I did not um start writing the temperatures at the exact moment and I was pretty busy managing the roast so lesson number one always be prepared to have everything set up ahead of time and number two I'm like maybe 10 uh maybe 15 seconds late on writing down some of the the attempts for the time that I check them so um it's still going to work don't worry about it um but yeah that's what I'm doing so we're approaching the one minute Mark as we roast this coffee and we're starting to look at temperatures notice how the temperature hasn't really changed take a close look it's been 250° for the first minute and let's see what happens it's 257 de uh there at the one minute Mark so it's now starting to progress but for the first minute or a minute and a half I've been going really easy on this roast take a look and you'll see on the display P2 is blinking I'm in the manual mode that's 25% heat right now I'm going to start pouring on the heat here in just a few seconds we'll be increasing it to about 75% heat but I'm monitoring these temperatures now why am I going slow with my roast um I'm going slow because I want the beans on this roster especially I've noticed that when I really push the roast hard the outside seems to get roasted a little more than the inside so I'm trying to get an even roast and I'm using temperatures this is point number one I'm using temperatures as a reference to help me understand how much heat is being exposed to the beans themselves and how that might influence the beans if I if I come in on a roast with a super super high temperature I'm going to be roasting the bean more on the outside than on the inside I guess what I mean by that is is that there'll be darker roasted coffee on the outer side of the bean compared to the inner portions of the bead bean and I'm trying to get an even roast all right so now the temperatures are going to be going up I just moved it up to P5 now we're going to 100% power and we're 2 and 1/2 minutes into the roast so this is something that uh a lot of bore people may not be doing uh I did it on this roast because I'm using a natural coffee so this um Bean is a little more sensitive to heat and number two I'm doing it as I mentioned because I'm trying to prevent you know an uneven roast and three I'm also preventing roasting defects roasting defects I've got a video on that you can check out I'll have it up here in the corner but roasting defects is another thing you don't want to do you don't want to have um like charred outside the bean you don't want to have char marks burn marks or blistering you don't want to have tipping where the Heat comes out the end of The Bean and there's these little black little burn marks on the tips of the bean and so I'm trying to prevent all of that roasting defects also include uh like underdevelopment I guess that's a roasting defect so I'm trying to have an even roast all the way through we are now approaching the 4minute mark but I'm going to be running down to 330 temperature here in just a second there it is 279 de now temperatures are helpful for us when we get familiar with our own roasting machines because we use them to know what our limits are as we're roasting this beore has a limit of about 320° during the first 5 minutes 325 maybe even a little bit more but I don't want to get too close to that because uh the the machine will potentially turn off because it gets too hot during that first few minutes and so that's kind of a safety feature built in so I am intentionally going to be staying under 320° during this roast um yeah so here we are 290° and so you'll see me manage the heat I'm pushing these buttons for two reasons one when I push the B button I'm checking the temperature the environmental temperature when I push any of the P buttons P1 through P5 I'm managing the power and you'll see the dis display um show you what power setting is currently being used right now right now I'm at full power P5 and we are 5 minutes into the roast the fan is just turning on on the bore I'm at 300 let's get my temp here and you'll see 315° now if I start reading my temperatures after this you'll see that they start to go down a little bit and that's because the fan is starting to circulate the air uh the temperatures will start to rise again and uh inside the roster there is a noticeable difference in temperature when I'm using like a real probe to measure temperature so it's not just the B more giving me a false reading here okay uh we are approaching the 530 temperature which I'm going to write down here in just a second here it is 313° the good news is we didn't lose a lot of heat on that so I'm really happy about that all right so at the 6 Minute Mark I'm my goal is to hit first crack about 6 minutes and then uh we're going to have a A 10minute or so first crack and then a 12 minute total roast time so the half a pound setting that I used here gave me 12 minutes on the clock and it's counting down and I'm not going to add any more time the bore allows you to do that but uh we're just going to do a 12 12 minute roast here and yeah so yeah 6 minutes is dry I just wrote that down we're headed to the 6:30 temperature here in just a minute all right so as we talk more about temperatures temperatures are used to help us uh predict and determine event times and you've heard me say we're going to hit 6 minutes at this time we're going to hit uh first crack at this time I can tell you that for for two reasons one is and on the bore it's mostly because of uh color and that's the scents that I'm using so I'm using color and I'm smelling you'll see me wafting a little bit here I want to smell the coffee so I want to know what's going on I'm starting to smell some baked goods while I'm roasting this there I am wafting right now cuz I want to know what's happening to this coffee the lighting in the beore isn't the greatest so you'll see me use a flashlight that helps me to monitor Bean color um also the amount of time and as I'm progressing in my temperatures I know approximately what temperatures I would be at uh when I reach uh like dry end how much time has it been at these temperatures I can get a pretty good estimate of where I'm going to be on the drum rooster I've got an actual temperature probe a bean probe and so I can even more closely monitor my temperatures and be even more precise based on on my roaster history the type of bean that I'm using that I'm familiar with I can you know determine dry end within a couple degrees of a certain temperature that I hit so that's pretty cool that's another reason we use temperatures while we roast coffee 313° is our current temperature that we're at right now at the 8 Minute Mark I've got two more minutes till I am reaching uh first crack and so I'm still at P5 here but you're going to see me toggle back and forth between P5 P4 and then as we get closer you may even see me lower it more down to P2 depending upon if I'm trying to slow the roast down or whether I'm trying to just keep first crack going so uh when I approach first crack I want to keep the momentum until I know I've got a good crack starting and then I will start to back down my heat and I will make slow adjustments and you'll see that happen here in just a second now I just backed it down to P3 and I'm probably going to go up to P4 here uh shortly and that's because my temperatures are uh you know they're up there um that's why I went down to P3 because we're right at that limit that 320 to 325 degree limit and from this point on it's going to be downward in my temperatures so I'm now moving it to uh from P3 I'm checking my temperatures and my next temperature I'm going to see that yeah it's going down and I'm going to add uh more heat now P4 75% so I went from 100% down to 50% power just so that I would not overheat and then uh as it started to come down I went back up to 75% power and that's because I can reference my temperatures that tell me what to do that's another benefit of my temperatures is I can see if I am applying too much heat or not enough heat if I'm applying it too fast or if I'm applying it too slow remember my target was first crack which it's happening right now I wanted to hit first crack at 10 minutes and so I kept P5 going 100% power because I wanted to make sure I met that time I backed it off because I didn't want to overheat the roster and and if I would have kept it up at 324 I probably would have come to First crack a little bit sooner than 10 minutes so that's just a little clue on how you can use your heat to make these minor adjustments for short periods of time just to kind of keep you on track with your Milestones okay so here I am I'm doing doing something really quick here my temperatures were a little higher than I wanted them I poured on that power to try to get me to my temperature event temperature at first crack and then I had a little too much momentum going so I cracked the door open there for just a few seconds just to lower the heat to make sure that I could get the temperatures down I don't want to over roast this coffee you can see me talk about this in more detail in my last video where I deal with uh heat management and I don't want to have my color of my bean get too dark because that is a reference for temperature Bean color is a reference for your overall temperature of your bean and we don't have a bean probe to tell us that so we use color as a reference to help us manage how much heat we want to apply to these beans before we drop them out of the raser I've got 10 seconds left this is coming out of the roster and and I'm my goal is for that Medium roast we have a declining temp now we're down to 291 and the cooling mode has just started so the heat has stopped the cool air is starting to blow into the rooster but I want to get these beans out and into the cooling tray I have for my drum right here they're going to cool in that uh tray right there and it's going to get cool really quick all right so success success we pulled the roast at at 12 minutes exactly like I wanted we hit first crack at 10:04 a few seconds after I wanted and we hit the 6 minute drive um event when we had uh predicted and when we had wanted to do that so now the beam or is going to be cooling down and I'm not going to waste our time showing that but I want to talk to you about what we do next we're going to take a look at these beans we're going to look at the color of the beans and here we go there they are pouring them into the dish they've already cooled off I I cut ahead a few minutes and these are going to be weighed in just a second but that's a great color that's the color that looks very similar almost identical to the color we had in the coffee last week depends on the lighting um with my phone when I use that like this is a little more of a yellow Hue um and again you're going to see those yellow looking beans there's a couple Quakers in there but some of that is just chaff that has not come off on the beans all right so now it's time to weigh them this is really going to tell us where we land in in our roast level we take the total accumulated uh weight of the green beans that we started with and we'll go ahead and get them up here on the screen here we go we had 226.24 84 and the moisture calculation the weight loss is 14.09% so 14 is that uh percentage that we have been hovering around during these roasts and that's going to tell us the roast level that we want okay so to summarize in this roast how did we use temperatures how did we use them to help us with our roast one we used temperatures to help us preheat our roaster so we had the roasting environment preheated to a certain temperature a starting temperature that's called the charg temperature that's the temperature that the beans go into the rooster 250° then we also referenced temperatures during this early stage where I went nice and easy on the beans and we hovered around the 250 to 260° mark for a couple of minutes and then we started to pour on the power so the variable that we used was heat only and we referenced temperatures The Roasting environment temperature to help us know when to pour on more heat then we also referenced temperatures as we are were working our way towards the dry phase we left the power uh once we got going at 100% to work our way up and we were monitoring temperatures to help keep us in a safe zone so that the roster wouldn't overheat once we re reached dry end the dry event and we were working our way towards first crack we had the fan turn on and we could see the influence that that had because we were able to reference temperatures and I was able to toggle my power settings to different settings to help me navigate through that Fan event that the bore has then I referenced temperatures when we were getting close to First crack and first crack started and I realized that I needed to slow slow things down quicker and I couldn't do that with just the temperature so I cracked the door open for just a few seconds and then I referenced temperatures to confirm that I had a downward trend on my temperatures during development so that we could help slow the roast down and uh also to help keep the bean color from getting too dark ultimately as I mentioned in my previous videos The Bean color is really going to be your true Compass when it comes to temperatures um temperatures as in the impact of the bean itself the temperature of the bean itself we don't have a bean probe so we can't reference that if you do have a bean probe I would caution you that depending upon your roasting method the way that you are applying heat you can have a variance in temperature of the the bean probe by uh five 5 or 7° and temperature if you're pouring on a lot of heat in the roasting environment you're going to influence that bean probe and have a higher reading than maybe if you would have gone slower and you may have a more accurate reading with the bean temperature um I was listening to Rob who talk about that and he mentioned seven degrees that he' seen uh depending upon you know how much power was being applied and so we can't just rely on just the temperature itself so these are all reasons why we want to reference temperatures but we can't let temperatures be the Beall or the everything for a roast we still have to use our senses we have to smell we have to listen for first crack we have to listen to maybe the tumbling and know when the beans are really starting to get lighter if you're using an air raster you can watch The Loft and notice that there's going to be a difference in the way that the coffee is bouncing up and down and then ultimately we're going to be smelling the coffee towards the end of the roast the best that we can and we're going to be watching The Bean color so that we don't over roast the coffee or that it's not under roasted okay so how does this coffee taste it tastes really good it tastes a little better than the uh last roast we did on the the pop it's a little more of a cleaner roast it has a little more complexity to it and uh it definitely has all of the notes that we um have been talking about in this roster the beore roast some great coffee there's people that are professional roaster right now and they started on the beore U that was one of their primary roaster they started to learn how to roast coffee on so it's a great roaster okay so U before we move on if this video has been helpful for you guys hit the like button right now subscribe to my channel and hit the notification Bell I upload videos regularly the next video that's going to be coming out is us talking about uh the graph we're going to be talking about a roasting plan we're going to be talking about the graph and we're going to be talking about why we're doing this and how we would use this graph during a roast so we're going to actually plot a roast before we do it and then we're going to roast the coffee and we're going to be using a different roer than the beore have you considered using your temperatures to help you gauge things like your dry phase and how long and what temperatures you need to be at in order to get you to your uh dry event are you guys looking at your temperatures a temperature that you want to be at at first crack the be more like I said doesn't have a bean temperature but many of us may have a Target goal for a temp temperature to get to First crack and so my question to you is how consistent is that temperature some of you may say it's very consistent and that's awesome those are anchors those are references that we can really um that we really want to hold on to and use to help us because it's just more information and it's a better way for us to get consistent roasts and it's a better way for us to learn from our mistakes so for me on this roast that I did my mistake was that I got a little too aggressive with the heat as we were coming into first crack and I didn't back the heat off soon enough I was more concerned about getting a rolling good rolling crack started and then backing my heat down and I I probably could have done a better job at that so temperatures are really important understanding those temperatures are really important but most of all know that that temperatures are used in various ways to give you information to help guide you through your roast the most important piece of information and data that you have that's going to give you a great successful roast is not just a temperature it's your senses it's your sight it's your smell and it's your sound and those are things as I mentioned in my last video we need to practice and now as we introduce temperatures into our roasting environment we need to learn how we can apply those to help us get through a successful roast so take a look at your rooster temperature pay attention to it start to plot out the temperatures like I did so that you can see what's happening at each moment in the roast I can easily go back and look at my chart and I can see the mistakes that I made or what I should have done or how the roast behaved differently I hope this video has been helpful for you guys please share your comments share your thoughts I know that I probably have left some stuff out this is just one way to help us get more information so that we can roast better coffee tell me what you think I'd love to hear it thanks for joining me today and I hope you have a great week roasting we'll see you next [Music] time

Channel: Virtual Coffee Lab - Home Coffee Roaster

Views: 6,117

Keywords: how to roast coffee, roasting coffee, home coffee roasting, coffee roasting, coffee roaster, coffee roasting at home, specialty coffee, 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?, coffee roasting temperatures, Secret sauce of roasting coffee

Id: EJbF4dhZ7aE

Length: 26min 32sec (1592 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023