Roasting done right, or at least better, with a little help from my friends. This time with less smoke and no burning nuggets of doom!

If you want to learn about something go find the people that are passionate about it, the internet and all its splendor of forums and subreddits are ideal for this. Then go into student mode and assume ignorance, don’t be afraid to ask dumb questions and keep an open mind to all possibilities. If you put yourself in a constant state of apprenticeship, you would be shocked at what you can learn. A similar tactic holds true with any tradesman. If you want to learn about your furnace, or air conditioner call up the repairman when it breaks, then when they arrive to fix it sit with them WITH A NOTEBOOK take notes and ask questions. Generally tradesmen are passionate about what they do and if someone sees that you are actively listening to them they will share a substantial amount of information. Write it all down notate it then go back through with secondary and tertiary sources find the common threads, these are going to be your sources of truth. Then you can decide if the outlier information is little bit of wisdom or needless garbage.

Back to the coffee:

After a harsh failure with a whirely pop and a grill burner I decided to start over with an air popcorn popper bought off of ebay. The results were a wonderful reversal, from complete failure to down right good. Again this process was researched from various sources as well as the folks over at /r/roasting which was a passionate community about coffee and roasting. I scoured through their posts and found some common threads about air poppers. Then I was enthused to find that I can modify the air popper to further refine the process. Future projects to do are going to be temperature sensors and then a full roast profile automation build that should allow me to completely control the variables of the roast to get the best temperature profile and all the right times.

~TLDR

roasting process:

Roaster: West Bend Poppery ll 1200 watt

Beans: Guatemala Antigua Estate Peaberry; Cultivars Bourbon, Typica; Grade Peaberry

Green weight: 4.0 oz

Roasted weight 3.6 oz

First crack 4:30

Dropped at 9:45

This is the follow up post to “Failing hard failing fast and leaving smoldering nuggets of doom behind”