Rwanda Yellow Honey Kanyege

Beans: Rwanda Yellow Honey Kanyege
Varietal: Bourbon
Elevation: 1800-2000 masl
Process: Honey
Retailer: Sweet Maria's
Pre-Roast Weight: 234 grams
Roast Attempt: 35th
Roast Date/Time: June 26, 2021, 1400 CDT

Given my roasting history with non-washed coffees, I was a little nervous to roast a honey or natural process in the back room at my in-laws' (or really anywhere).  But the description of this Rwandan just sounded too good, plus I've spent the last few days drinking a Rwandan from Hansa Roasters in Libertyville that's been pretty good.  Again, I really love East African coffees, and it's moderately rare that you see a honey process from there - usually it's full natural if anything.

I started the roast on manual control, one-pound setting (18:00 on the clock), 100% power to the heating element (P5).

Chamber Temperature

16:00 - 140
14:00 - 219
13:00 - 246
12:00 - 271
11:00 - 291
10:00 - 278

The temperatures ran even slightly cooler than they had for the last roast, which I did in the kitchen rather than the back room.  I have no idea what kind of power differentials we're talking about here or how much of a difference I should expect a difference in... voltage (?) to make.  Maybe I need to buy a multimeter or something.  At any rate, the temperatures weren't off by that much, the 10:00 temperature was the same as last time, and the beans seemed to be yellowing normally.  So at 10:30 I went ahead and increased the drum speed and lowered the heat to 75% power (P4) as usual.

Exhaust Temperature

10:00 - 195
9:00 - 278
8:00 - 316
7:00 - 336
6:00 - 347
5:00 - 356
4:00 - 361
3:00 - 370

This was the slowest temperature gain I've seen since I started using the roaster.  195 at 10:00 wasn't that shocking even though it was on the lower side - in Kansas that number was always over 200 - but where I really started to get concerned was at 6:00, frequently a time when first crack would be getting close if it hadn't started already.  No first crack had been heard, and 347 on the exhaust temp is a lot lower than I'm used to seeing at 6:00.  Even compared to the last roast it was 14 degrees lower, and compared to some of the ones from Kansas... 6:00 is usually in the range of 370!  I started checking the exhaust temp more frequently and it did continue to rise, but slowly.  When it got under 5:00 and there was still no first crack (with the B temp holding at a low-ish 237) I made a decision to turn the power back up to P5.  This seemed like the push needed - first crack started at 3:50, about a minute later (14:10 into the roast).  It wasn't an especially noisy first crack, so the taper wasn't super obvious - with the temperature nowhere near alarmingly high, I let the roaster go all the way to 2:30 before hitting cool, which wasn't my longest roast ever but was my longest roast that I didn't essentially turn into charcoal.  The A temp peaked at 381 after 30 seconds of cooling, then dropped again, which isn't even close to how hot I've taken this thing, so there were minimal concerns there.  As usual I opened the door at 90 seconds into the cooling cycle to help get the hot air out.

As far as the chaff goes, I was actually somewhat surprised.  There was a fair amount of chaff left in and around the roaster when I was done, and there were a few flaming bits here and there right at the end of the roast - also I got a little belch of smoke when I flipped the cycle to cool.  But overall this batch didn't really do anything to concern me on the chaff front, which is especially surprising not just given my previous experience with naturals but considering that Sweet Maria's went so far as to warn Behmor users not to roast full batches of this coffee on their retail page for it!  Perhaps there is a silver lining to the diminished power: less risk of non-washed coffees starting a fire.  I'll take an extra few minutes in front of the roaster as a trade for that, if so.

Complete Roast Time: 15:30
Post-Roast Weight: 202 grams
Loss Percentage: 13.7%

Especially for a non-washed process, I'm thinking that should be a pretty solid medium.  More material on the beans means a bit more weight to potentially lose, and given that the A temperature topped out at 381 I don't think there's any risk of these things being further along than a medium.  They might even still lean slightly medium-light, although the length of the roast might preclude that characterization.  I do hope I didn't roast all the acidity out of them with the sort of low-and-slow approach, but there should still be some nice flavors there either way.  Maybe on the second batch I could try and run it at P5 the entire time, at least if I'm still on this outlet - although I don't want to throw too much heat at beans this chaffy either.  It's a process.

Rwanda Yellow Honey Kanyege

These were the beans on Wednesday, four days off roast.  The color looked like a nice medium brown across the batch, and the aroma was pleasantly roasty.  I ground the beans at my usual 5/6 medium-coarse, then brewed them in the Chemex.  61 grams of ground beans plus a bit over a liter of water produced 31 fluid ounces of coffee, with the entire brewing process taking about ten minutes.  This is fairly slow, even with the greater amount of coffee and water used compared to the V60 pourovers I used to do for just myself, but I've always found Chemex to be a much slower brew method compared to the V60 even allowing for the difference in volume.

TASTING NOTES: I definitely didn't roast all the acidity out.  The coffee had a fairly strong citric lead, with maybe a slight contribution from the processing that made me think of pink lemonade (albeit leaning a bit more to the bitter side than the sweet side).  Underneath that were some of the warm flavor notes that had made the coffee sound so intriguing to me - hints of maple sugar, a spice note that was a bit like cinnamon with a pinch of nutmeg - and beneath that a lingering sensation of honeysuckle.  The body was slightly thinner than I might have liked but it wasn't watery.

VERDICT: I actually did not love this coffee on first sip - the acidity was pretty strong (this is a fairly high-grown coffee after all, and it was roasted lower than I would have planned) and punched me in the face a bit.  But it developed nicely as I got further into it, and ultimately I enjoyed what it delivered.  I think it compared favorably with the professionally-roasted Rwandan I had recently; in the end that's all I'm really looking for.