Mahal Coffee Roast Log Blog

Beans: Ethiopia Dry Process Bogale Deyaso Varietal: Ethiopian Heirloom Elevation: ~2000 masl Process: Natural Retailer: Sweet Maria's Pre-Roast Weight: 223 grams Roast Attempt: 28th Roast Date/Time: April 19, 2021, 1800 CDT Well, that was fun. The reason this is roast attempt #28 when the last post was roast attempt #25 is because I did two batches in between; I didn't make entries for them because they're beans I've already done entries on and I roasted them for other people (meaning that there was no need to taste them myself, unless I was worried I screwed up, which I wasn't).  So here we are, back at the Bogale Deyaso that so confounded me on the first attempt. I wouldn't exactly say things went worse this time, but they went weird in a different way.  Rather so.  Once again, I tried planning the roast in advance.  I mean, I always do that, but I was trying to be pretty meticulous about when I was going to stop the roast, since last time I backed awa...

Beans: Ethiopia Dry Process Bogale Deyaso Varietal: Ethiopian Heirloom Elevation: ~2000 masl Process: Natural Retailer: Sweet Maria's Pre-Roast Weight: 236 grams Roast Attempt: 25th Roast Date/Time: April 17, 2021, 1530 CDT This was the third coffee my dad and I picked out for the coffee tasting, and it was also the one I was most nervous about.  I've only tried roasting a natural coffee (also from Ethiopia) once before, and it went... okay at best.  The beans were chaffier than most and gave me the biggest scare regarding potential fire risk that I've had to date, and I also overroasted them a bit, ending up with more of a medium-dark roast. In an attempt to avoid repeating that, I made a plan for this roast.  I was going to send the roast to cool when the exhaust thermistor ("A Temp") read 380... or at the end of first crack.  This seemed like a solid plan, and then the beans decided to totally confuse me.  Great way to celebrate a quarter-century of roa...

Beans: Guatemala Organic Huehuetenango Familia Ovalle Varietals: Bourbon, Caturra, Catuai Elevation: 1400-2000 masl Process: Washed Retailer: Sweet Maria's Pre-Roast Weight: 235 grams Roast Attempt: 24th Roast Date/Time: April 16, 2021, 1330 CDT This was the second of the three coffees picked out for the tasting session (see the previous post ).  I was perhaps slightly more nervous about how to handle it because ordinarily I like to push Central Americans a little bit deeper into the roast (unless, as with the El Salvadoran Pacamara , it's specifically suggested otherwise), and if I go a little too far it will still work for milk drinks.  Given that this one was being roasted with the intention of pulling out tasting notes, however, I couldn't really afford to overdo it.  I settled on trying something I hadn't really done before, though perhaps I should have: using a planned maximum temperature as the guide for when to go into the cooling cycle.  Trying to use ...

Beans: Papua New Guinea Kainantu Urara Varietals: Arusha, Bourbon, Typica Elevation: 1700 masl Process: Washed Retailer: Sweet Maria's Pre-Roast Weight: 233 grams Roast Attempt: 23rd Roast Date/Time: April 13, 2021, 1700 CDT A few months ago, my dad organized a Zoom-based coffee tasting with three coffees he roasted and sent out to the participants.  As I've spent a lot of time in the past couple years diving deep into coffee, he brought me on to serve as the "expert" to discuss the history of coffee and some of the finer points.  It went well enough that he decided to do it again this month, and this time I thought it might be interesting if I got the same beans he was using and roasted them myself, for comparative purposes (and to make it easier for me to work out the tasting notes in advance).  This does mean I have to try and roast the coffee in a comparable fashion to what he did, but it should be reasonably close as long as I don't screw up. As usual,...

Beans: Congo Kivu Kalehe Cooperative Varietal: Bourbon Elevation: 1600 masl Process: Washed Retailer: Sweet Maria's Pre-Roast Weight: 232 grams Roast Attempt: 22nd Roast Date/Time: April 1, 2021, 1830 CDT Trying to get through some of the roasted coffee I had on hand, I went eight days without roasting, so it was time to get back to it.  Congo is another origin that I'm pretty new to, although not totally - in my currently dormant 50 state roaster project I had a Congolese coffee roasted in Connecticut.  (It was fine .)  Like Yemen, an origin I enjoy quite a lot, it's also a country that has had a lot of struggles with conflict, especially in its primary coffee-growing regions around Lake Kivu in the east of the country.  Hopefully, then, the ability to export a commodity crop like coffee is a positive thing for the region. As usual, the starting setting was a manual roast on P5 (100% power to the heating element) with 18:00 on the timer (one-pound setting). ...