Cameroon Caplami Java Cultivar

Beans: Cameroon Caplami Java Cultivar
Varietal: Java
Elevation: 1300-1800 masl
Process: Washed
Retailer: Sweet Maria's
Pre-Roast Weight: 235 grams
Roast Attempt: 45th
Roast Date/Time: September 6, 2021, 1000 CDT

I forget if I've mentioned it before on this particular blog, but one thing that definitely hastened my obsession with coffee was the fact that there are so many different components you can control for and thus so many different ways to experience what is functionally the same product - as well as different aspects of the product that you can "collect."  Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to country of origin.  At this point I've tried coffee from almost every origin of note, but every once in a while a new one pops up and it's always intriguing.  Truth be told, I've actually had Cameroonian coffee once before - a few years ago, Trader Joe's sold some that I picked up a bag of - but never at the specialty level and certainly never roasted myself.  It's just not that common - Cameroon grows mostly Robusta coffee, but like everywhere else in West Africa that grows coffee, Arabica is hard to come by.  So when it popped up on Sweet Maria's list, I had to jump at it.

As usual, the roast process began with manual control, a one-pound setting (18:00 on the timer), and with 100% power to the heating element (P5).

Chamber Temperature

16:00 - 136
14:00 - 210
13:00 - 237
12:00 - 258
11:00 - 278
10:00 - 271

This ran a few degrees cooler than the Rwandan I had done two hours earlier - not a massive difference, certainly, but perhaps air conditioning units were starting to come on.  I thought it was early enough and cool enough outside that I could get away with trying my old process, wherein I dropped the power to 75% (the P4 setting) at the yellowing phase; I wasn't trying to roast these super light and fast, so I wanted to see if I could extend the roast a little.  Yellowing seemed to occur around 10:30, the same as the Rwandan, so it seemed like things were going according to plan.  I increased the drum speed and dropped the power to P4.

Exhaust Temperature

10:00 - 190
9:00 - 267
8:00 - 303
7:00 - 321
6:00 - 334
5:00 - 341
4:00 - 350
3:00 - 359
2:00 - 366
1:00 - 374

At 6:00, the exhaust temperature was 25 degrees behind where it had been in the last roast.  Even allowing for the fact that I had lowered the power, it was somewhat concerning as far as the roast potentially stalling - my Kansas roasts, back in the winter and early spring, did not have temperatures anywhere near this low in the 7:00-6:00 range. The chamber temp was also down to 240 - not super unusual when dropping to P4, but still on the low side. So at 5:50, I pushed the heating elements back to 100% power (P5).  The climb was still not dramatic but it eventually got there, hitting first crack at 2:00.  With first crack seeming to finish after about a minute, I sent the roaster into the cooling cycle at just under 1:00, slowing the drum after 45 seconds and opening the door after 90.

Complete Roast Time: 17:00
Post-Roast Weight: 202 grams
Loss Percentage: 14.0%

That's what you want to see for a solid medium, which is what I was going for, so even after all the fretting about temperature things seemed okay.

Cameroon Caplami Java Cultivar

These were the beans on Friday, four days off roast.  They retained a fair amount of skin, I noted; I wonder whether that's just a feature of these beans or whether that is more likely in a slower roast.  In any event, the color looked pretty good.  My wife having left early for work, I brewed just 32 grams of beans with 533 grams of water in the V60, coming out with 16.8 fluid ounces of brewed coffee.

TASTING NOTES: This was an interesting one.  I noted a strong orangey lead, which then faded back to share the stage with a creamier body and notes of dark sugar syrup and toasted grain.  It was a little like chocolate and caramel at times as well.  There was a mild woodiness to the flavor, though not in a bad way, and then a lingering fruitiness at the back end.  Sweet Maria's tasting notes had mentioned "powdered orange drink" - stuff like that is always amusingly specific, but I definitely could see what they were going for.  The notes of orange overlaid with some of the sweet and grainy notes created a mental image of that ersatz off-orange taste that you get from something like Tang.

VERDICT: On the whole I think this came out quite well considering how worried I was about the temperature curve.  The flavor notes that were found there by others largely appeared, which means my process was able to produce reasonably consistent results relative to "normal."  I got to try a new specialty origin, I got to roast a new specialty origin, and hey, I got to enjoy it too.  Not bad.