Zambia Isanya Estate

Beans: Zambia Isanya Estate
Varietal: Catimor
Elevation: 1500 masl
Process: Washed
Retailer: Sweet Maria's
Pre-Roast Weight: 232 grams
Roast Attempt: 48th
Roast Date/Time: September 25, 2021, 1800 CDT

The rare evening roast!  I was a bit leery of this one being exclusively Catimor - my palate tends to be iffy on coffees that have too much Robusta in their genetics.  But I couldn't pass up the relatively uncommon origin, and I once had a coffee from Yunnan, China that was 100% Catimor and was super enjoyable, so it's not an immediate rule-out.  My intention was to run this with my usual settings - manual control, 18:00, P5 heat setting - but then I screwed up and forgot to hit the P5 button at the start of the roast, and so the Behmor ended up running its automatic P1 program.  I believe that program runs hot for most of the roast, so it wasn't far off what I would have been going for anyway, but it annoyed me.

Chamber Temperature

16:00 - 136
14:00 - 212
13:00 - 239
12:00 - 262
11:00 - 280
10:00 - 276

Despite not using manual control, this was a pretty normal heating curve up to the opening of the exhaust vent and the yellowing phase.  I actually thought the yellowing arrived fairly early on these beans, coming in around 11:00 on the timer (7:00 into the roast).  That used to be a fairly common time but it's been arriving later recently - perhaps on a cooler evening the available power is ramping back up.  I increased drum speed when the yellowing hit, as usual.

Exhaust Temperature

10:00 - 190
9:00 - 275
8:00 - 316
7:00 - 336
6:00 - 348
5:00 - 359
4:00 - 368
3:00 - 379

Despite not being manually controlled, the heating curve here was almost identical to what I had on the Yemen roast the week before, which I guess tells you either that manual control is not essential to coffee roasting or that I could be using it a lot more experimentally than I have to date.  Also similarly to the Yemen, the first crack was pretty late - it didn't start until about 4:00, with the A temp already pushing 370.  It was also one of the longest I've seen, hanging on for a good 90 seconds and still not 100% tapered when I called the roast at 2:30 and hit cool.  The A temp ran as high as 386 early in the cool, which is not anywhere close to the highest I've seen, but is higher than a lot of roasts I do.  A fair amount of visible smoke actually appeared as the cooling fans started blowing, and there was some flaming chaff as well.

Complete Roast Time: 15:30
Post-Roast Weight: 195 grams
Loss Percentage: 15.9%

Another one past where I wanted it, and I didn't have the excuse of roasting a natural process this time, although the beans were on the larger side.  I've seen large beans before lose a percentage not commensurate with what the true roast level ends up being - for instance, the El Salvador Pacamara which came out at 14% but brewed like a light.  Add a mere three or four grams in weight back across the entire batch and you're in the mid 14s, which would be more like a rich medium.  And this was a moderately chaffy bean despite being fully washed.  So maybe it will be okay?

Zambia Isanya Estate

These were the beans on Tuesday, three days off roast.  I was pleasantly surprised to note that this definitely looked and smelled like a rich medium and not like anything that had pushed into the darker registers.  There were no visible oil spots on the beans, they retained pebbled surfaces instead of the smooth and shiny ones of a darker roast, and the aroma did not have that characteristic acridity.  I ground the beans to a medium-coarse 5/6 in my burr grinder, then brewed 30 grams with 500 grams of water in my V60, which generated 16 fluid ounces of brewed coffee in a three minute drip time.

TASTING NOTES: This definitely was not a dark roast!  There were some hints of bittering, but there is Timor in the genetics, after all.  The opening hit was surprisingly sweet, a mild citrus with some of those back end bitter notes, maybe like a bitter orange or sweet lime.  There was definitely an herbaceous, woodsy note, like a sappy pine, and I also picked up hints of maple syrup.  The cup had a real foresty, earthy kind of vibe on the whole, not shocking for something that originated in Indonesia.

VERDICT: I'm coming up on 50 roasts, but I'm definitely still learning things all the time.  You really have to judge roast level by a combination of finished color and loss percentage, as much as I would like to be able to weigh the beans after the roast and say I hit the level I wanted.  Even then, the color of these right out of the roaster looked like they'd been pushed too far, and then after a couple days it turned out that wasn't the case.  I'm sure I've said this before but I probably need to start doing deeper dives into the science of this stuff if I ever want to do it more than casually.  Most of the beans I've worked with have been pretty tolerant of my futzing around and I've certainly had some excellent results, but I tend to feel like to this point, most of the good results have been more about the quality of the inputs than anything I did specifically (whereas most/all of the bad results have been all me).  This was another good result that happened almost in spite of me, screwing up with the program instead of controlling the roast manually, but hey, I'll take it for now.