Welcome to this video, I'm Ingo from Roast Rebels and today I will talk about how to develop a roast profile. I often hear from many of you that you're kind of overwhelmed by all the information or before doing your first roast you don't know where to start or how to develop your profile. It all looks very difficult, roasting looks like a kind of magic and in fact, what I can tell you it's not magic, it's not rocket science, it's just a way of preparing food. You can compare it to baking a cake, if you hadn't learned it at home or if you wouldn't have very good books for baking a cake, it would look maybe even much more magic than roasting a coffee. So roasting coffee is a preparation and if you know the basics how to roast the coffee then the chance is very high that you're going to roast a very nice coffee. In this video, I will introduce you to those basics. I will give you some key recommendations on how to roast a coffee. Of course, you can then go much deeper in detail on each aspect and we will do follow-up videos, especially for special aspects. Please don’t forget that there are even world championships in roasting but don't be overwhelmed. You don't have to be a roasting world champion now. Just start with it and you're going to have a very nice fresh good coffee. So I will divide this video into two portions. In the first, I will talk about three aspects that are important when you roast coffee and then we will go through the different stages of coffee roasting and I will just give you some recommendations or the points where you have to take your decisions in order to develop your roast profile. But what's important in roasting, so these three aspects are first; the consistency in your roast all over the bean and from inside to the outside. If your coffee is evenly roasted on all sides and from inside to the outside then the chance is very high that you're going to have a nice roasted coffee. In the worst case, the coffee is still green and underdeveloped on the inside which will give it a grassy taste and burned on the outside which will give you a kind of charcoal taste. So this is the worst-case and we are going to try to prevent this by following the recommendation which I will give you further in this video. And here you actually have to take into consideration that it will make a big difference if you roast with a roasting machine that is really constructed for this and which is evenly turning, has a mix of air
flow and like convective and conductive
heat transfer or on the other hand, if you're having a homemade alternative roasting method. So there, it's always a bit more difficult to really reach this even roast of the bean. I will for sure do some other videos where I will go a bit into these alternative roasting methods and give you some recommendation on what you could do to even roast as well, but just for you to know if you change or if you're using a roasting machine that's really constructed for roasting coffee then the chance is much higher that you're going to get an even roast. The second aspect is not technical, this is really a sensorial or a personal aspect it's the decision of your bean, of the green coffee that you choose and the roast profile, mostly also the roast degree that you're using for this bean. I mean if you're working on the roast profile the most important aspect of the flavor of your coffee when it comes to the roast profile is the roast degree that you choose. Here it's really recommended that you are aware, that you take care of all the coffees that you're drinking if you drinking a bought coffee for example from a small roaster, most of the smaller roasters give you information about where the coffee is coming from, what kind of beans it is, how it has been prepared. I will also do videos on that to get a better understanding of how this can
influence the taste of your coffee You can also find a lot of information about that online but just to know the choice of your bean has a big impact on the taste of your coffee and then also the degree of roast has a high impact on the flavor of your coffee To make it a bit more clear: if you're looking for a typical Italian coffee, typical Italian espresso, you maybe like coffee that has some chocolaty nutty aspects, that is sweet that has a full mouthfeel and most probably you're looking also for coffee that has low acidity that is not so sour as other coffees. For example, if you choose the wrong bean for this, if you're choosing for example a beautiful Ethiopian your Yirgacheffe, which is a beautiful filter coffee, but if you're choosing this bean for an espresso roast then you will struggle most probably because this bean has from nature a very high acidity in it. It's quite sour, it's fruity, sweet but acidic as well and to roast this acidic taste out of the beam you would have to go so
dark, so this is also for information, the darker you go the less acidic the coffee is, so you would have to go so dark that the coffee is losing on body and
sweetness and actually, you would kind of dead roast your bean. If you choose on the other hand the right bean for a coffee like this, which could be a yellow bourbon from Brazil, which could be an Indian bean, which could be a bean from Indonesia for example or also Carnivora a robusta bean or even a monsoon malabar. These are all coffees that are low in acidity from nature and this means you don't have to roast the coffee too dark to bring out the acidity, so you can go for example to a second crack and if you're roasting to this full city plus, if you're roasting to the beginning of the second crack and you will still have the full mouthfeel, you will still have some body in the coffee, some sweetness in it and you will actually reach this profile that you're going to look for. The third aspect is the prevention of roast defects, so the most common roast defects are burning your coffee bean and typically scorching, you can see this when you have little black dots like parts that have been split off of your bean and are really black. This is scorching or on the other hand tipping. Tipping you can see a bit more difficult than scorching but still, you can see it these are like black ends of your bean. These are the most common roasting fails when it comes to burning the bean and this will just have a very unpleasant burned flavor in your coffee. Even if you have a light roast then another roast defect is underdeveloped coffee, so coffee which is still green and grassy in the taste The third very common roast defect is the so-called baking, so if the coffee is not roasted but baked when the roasting process is taking too long the roast is not getting really with the right momentum through the first crack then you will have a taste which is a bit like cardboard, unpleasant. This is the so-called baked coffee that you have to prevent. So we had these three aspects, roasting the bean evenly then choosing the right bean and the right degree of roast and the prevention of roast defects How you will do this, I will explain to you now when we go through the different stages of a roast. So the first thing is the preparation of your roast you have to choose how much coffee you're load into your roaster. And the amount of coffee of green coffee that you will put in your roaster will have an influence on the roast profile and also on the taste of your coffee. So if you're really working on roast profiles then I really recommend you to always choose the same amount of beans that you're putting in your roaster and in best case also the same temperature of beans. Store your beans in a place where is consistent temperature so that you're not going to have beans that might be like eight degree Celsius and you're the time have some beans that are like 25-27 degree Celsius Most roasters will give you a recommendation on the capacity of the roaster so for example for a Hottop roaster it's 100 to 300 grams of coffee and you can stay within this amount of coffee. When you put too much coffee in your roaster so when you're overloading it then there is a high risk that you're going to bake your coffee because roasting is just going to take too long and on the other hand, if you're not putting enough beans in your coffee then you have a risk of burning the coffee a risk of scorching and tipping of the coffee. So stay within this range and also be consistent in the amount of coffee that you load in your roaster. The second thing is the choice of the right start temperature, and maybe here also something to tell, I have some people who came to me and said well I preheated my Hottop roaster for 10 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius. What I can tell you, you don't have to do this. Maybe you learn it in videos when it comes to professional roasting or to production roasting but it's a big difference if you have this small home roasting machine or a big production roaster, for the big production roaster, there's so much steel around the machine that it really takes quite some time to heat the roaster up. In production roasting, it's very common that the first or even the first few roasts of a day have a different roast profile than the other ones, just because their roaster isn't hot yet. This isn't really an issue for the home roasting machines which are quite small and have much less mass that has to be preheated. So here you can really start, go to your start temperature, and then put in the beans and start to roast. When it comes to the start temperature then you also have to show choose a temperature that is not too high and not too low. If your temperature is too high then you have a risk of burning the beans, if your temperature is too low then you have a risk that you're not quick enough with a roast and that you're losing the momentum which will lead to this baked coffee. So choose the right star temperature and then when you are working on profiles I really recommend you to try different star temperatures. Do the same profile in your roast just with different start temperatures try this and then cup the coffee one after the other to find the perfect starting temperature for your coffee. After this loading of the coffee, there is the phase where you will heat the beans and when it comes to heat transfer to the beans you have to be aware that there are two phases in the coffee roasting. One is the phase which is starting with loading the beans that then ending with the first crack. Now the beans are endothermic this means that just taking up the heat again and again and they're taking up a lot of heat, so you have to give energy by putting the burner high or the heating element high but then when you come to the first crack something is changing in the bean that they're starting to be exothermic so this means the beans are even themself releasing temperature or heat and if I don't control their roast at that stage, if I just burn with the same heat, then the coffee will be uncontrolled, will be burned, will be roasted too fast. At the first crack, you always have to reduce the heat in your roasting process and now, a very important aspect of how much you should reduce the temperature then. If you think of these two stages the stage one is from putting the bean in the roaster until the first crack and then the second phase is the development phase which starts with the first crack and ends with the end of the roast. The first part has to be about 80% of the time of your roast and the second part about 20%. This does not have to be taken to precise but it's just something that will help you if you're taking this into consideration. It can be at the end 15 to 25% or like this but just be aware that it's more or less 20% of the development phase versus 80% of the phase to the first crack. This means if you're making a lighter roast then you have to reduce the temperature at the first crack much more because then you will slow down the roast process because in the same amount of time you will reach a lower end temperature, while if you're doing for example espresso roast, a darker roast then you will keep up the burner bit more at the first crack because you want to have a faster development phase and end at a higher temperature or darker roast in the same amount of time This has to be taken into consideration. If you want to play around with the heat transfer a little bit more you can divide the first phase also that you're defining a drying point. This is actually more or less the time where the beans are getting from hey yellow to peanuts brown. and you can set a timer there let them play around with the amount of temperature giving in the first phrase from filling the roaster to this point and in the second phase from this point to the end of the roast. What I often do is I prolong the roast time a little bit at this drying point so maybe for a minute, I go down with the burner to 50%, prolong it a little bit This will often pronounce the sweetness in the coffee much more but then I will put up the heater again to full power because I want to go with enough momentum through the first crack in order to prevent these baked tastes. Just to be clear on how to define the first crack, it's not when you have the first few pops in your coffee but when the popping is regularly, so if you have for example three pops [popping noises] then you define the first crack. Another aspect is the airflow, so the definition of air that you're giving in the roaster and the airflow has two functions. One is really ... like putting steam and smoke out of your roast in the first phase, we will have some steam because the coffee is dried and then around the first crack, there will be a lot of smoke and you want to take this out of the roaster but the airflow also has an influence on the taste of your coffee so the mix of convective and conductive heat transfer. If you influence this it will also influence the taste of your coffee. It's a bit difficult to find some concrete and clear information on this but what I can give you just as a starting point is if you are having more airflow during the roast then you will usually have a clearer more complex coffee. so if you're more going for surveyed coffees then you like to roast with a bit more airflow If you prefer a bit this classical more like the nutty, chocolatey taste then you usually go with a bit less airflow. And then when the roast is ended, at the endpoint you put out the beans of your roaster and you have to cool them within four or five minutes, better four minutes to room temperature and then the roast is finished. So this is it, I hope this video
was helpful for you. If you want to know more about roasting then also follow our channel. We will publish some more videos and also go into some aspects a bit more deeply on what I talked about in this video. I always look forward to hearing from you if you have any more
questions you find my contact on roastrebels.com [Music]
