Simon Fell > Its just code > HomeRoasting

Sunday, April 15, 2007


Sulawesi Toraja
Yikes, Its been quite a while since I last roasted , I fired up the iRoast this weekend, and roasted a batch of Sulawesi Toraja, it didn't turn out quite as consistent as i'd liked. I tied it in a cup of drip today, and it was quite drinkable, but kinda flat, based on the Sweet Maria's blurb, I think next time I need to let it get to 2nd crack. Today, I tried making my own blend, 50% of the Sulawesi Toraja and 50% Ethiopian dry processed Ghimbi, which should add some good aromatics and more of an earthy / chocolatey flavor. I let this one run longer than yesterdays batch, and the resulting roast looks more consistent, will find out in the week how it tastes.

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

I've been drinking the Brazil Carmo Estate Peaberry that I roasted last week, had a couple of french presses of it at the office, it wasn't that good in the press, in particular when hot it had a slight acidic off taste, it went away as it cool, but I found it off putting. By far the best result was in the melitta drip where it had a great berry note. I think I fudged the vac-pot that I made of it, it didn't have the clean crisp taste that I normally get, I think I let it brew too long. (I'm still dialing in my vac-pot skills). Next time I'll be stopping the roast sooner that I did in this batch, probably try and get it just before it goes into second crack.

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

If you hang out on Coffee Geek for any length of time you'll realize that lots of people are into home roasting, buying green beans and roasting/blending themselves. I was intruiged and a whileback picked up an iRoast from home roasters central, Sweet Marias. To date I've only really roasted their pre-blended espresso blends, mainly espresso monkey and moka kadir. After the Stumptown trip, I've decided to branch out more into single origin coffee, so tonight I roasted up a batch of Brazil Carmo Estate Peaberry beans. I haven't kept any roast notes thus far, but now i think i'm going to have pay more attention and keep better track of what i've done and how things turn out, and my blog seems as good as place as any for that. (I really need to write the category support for my blogging engine)
I roasted a 5.5oz batch, however i noticed that the beans weren't really moving as well as the other roasts I've done, and I'm assuming that's a side effect of their smaller size, so next time i should do a smaller batch size (probably 5.0oz). I believe the movement problem resulted in the final roast not being as even as it could of been (you can see the variations in roasted colors). It was hard to hear second crack over the noise of the iRoast, but I'd guess I was about 10 seconds into second crack by the time I hit the cool button and this was 7:30 mins into the roast. We'll find out on friday what it tastes like.