Dominican Republic Ramirez Estate Washed Organic
Beans: Dominican Republic Ramirez Estate Washed Organic
Varietal: Caturra
Elevation: 1400 masl
Process: Washed
Retailer: Burman Coffee Traders
Pre-Roast Weight: 232 grams
Roast Attempt: 56th
Roast Date/Time: October 24, 2021, 1500 CDT
The "retailer" section of these blog posts, as seen above, was one that started to feel kind of silly to me after a while. I initially included it thinking that I might be sourcing my green coffee from various places, but Sweet Maria's does such a good job that I never spent much time looking anywhere else. Occasionally, though, I would stumble upon the Burman Coffee Traders site, a more local green coffee retailer (based out of Madison, Wisconsin). At first I was somewhat resistant because the Burman site is often rather more stingy with some of those details I like to include - for instance, I had to find the varietal and elevation information for this batch by searching the estate name and getting it off a different website - but ultimately they had origins that Sweet Maria's has never offered, and, as you might guess, I simply couldn't resist.
I ordered five pounds of coffee from Burman, and decided to start with this one, from the Dominican Republic. I've never had Dominican coffee at all (indeed, three of the five origins I ordered are completely new to me even from a drinking standpoint; all five are new from a roasting standpoint, of course) and wasn't sure what to expect. My history of roasting island coffees isn't lengthy and is pretty much confined to Indonesians, which might not give me much idea of how to work with a Caribbean coffee. There are two other Caribbean origins in my order, which I won't spoil just yet, so I needed to figure this out if I was going to get some good outputs. I had to start somewhere, and this was the least pricey of the island coffees I had ordered, so it went in first.
As usual, I started the roaster on manual control, 18:00 on the timer, and 100% power to the heating element (P5).
Chamber Temperature
16:00 - 132
15:00 - 176
14:00 - 212
13:00 - 239
12:00 - 264
11:00 - 282
10:00 - 264
It was fairly cool out today, but the temperatures remained in that lower area that I've tended to see in Chicago as compared to what I was getting in Kansas City. So the whole "air conditioning makes your roaster run cooler" theory might be turning out to be a bust. We'll see as we get deeper into fall and then winter, I suppose.
Yellowing appeared to take place at about 10:30, though these were fairly moist beans by the smell and the window had a pretty good fog on it by 11:30, making it harder to call the yellowing. Whether or not the beans have exactly hit the phase, I've found 10:30 to be a pretty good time to adjust the roast and it's when the exhaust vent opens up on the 18:00 start time, so that works out. I sped up the drum and lowered the heating element to 75% power (P4).
Exhaust Temperature
10:00 - 194
9:00 - 276
8:00 - 312
7:00 - 332
6:00 - 343
5:00 - 352
4:00 - 357
3:00 - 363
2:00 - 372
1:00 - 381
This one just kept rolling, as you can see. With the A temp approaching 360, I pushed the heating element back to P5 at the 4:00 mark to try and get a launch into first crack. Once again, it did not really work - the preliminary popping sounds of first crack didn't start until 2:30, with the A temp in the upper 360s, and even then it took a good 45 seconds to really hit full first crack at 1:45! I had planned to let the roast go 30 seconds past the first crack taper and then stop it, shooting for a full medium, but what was 30 seconds past the taper? Most first cracks of the half-pound batches I roast are about a minute long, maybe 75 seconds, rarely any more than that. This one was still on its sporadic last pops 1:45 after the first ones! With the A temp now over 380 and first crack clearly winding up, I sent the roast to cool with 45 seconds left on the timer. The A temp briefly peaked at 390 in the first 20 seconds of cooling, then headed back down. I slowed the drum after a minute and opened the door after 90 seconds.
Complete Roast Time: 17:15
Post-Roast Weight: 192 grams
Loss Percentage: 17.2%
Well, suffice to say that is not what I was shooting for. I talk often enough about how you can't always count on the roast level of a given bean being locked in based solely on the number, but these looked medium-dark even right out of the roaster, and I've never had a bean over 17% that wasn't. I have dodged some bullets in the past, though - there was the Yemen roast from September that nearly hit 16% and yet in the cup profiled to a light roast. The beans I've gotten lucky with have usually been larger and/or moister, and these were both larger beans and quite clearly had that green, bell-pepper smell that has in the past seemingly contributed to 1-2% variance from the roast levels of drier beans. If this manages to hold at a rich medium - which is, after all, what I was shooting for - I would have to consider that a win.
These were the beans on Wednesday, three days off roast. The color and aroma did seem like they might have held at a rich medium - there was very minimal oil spotting (and the beans had a fairly wide size range so it wouldn't be surprising if some got pushed pretty close to second crack while the larger ones just passed first) and I didn't detect really any of that "dark roast" smell. Once I had ground 31 grams of them on the 5/6 setting for brewing in the V60, the ground coffee did have a pretty rich smell but still not what I would have called "full dark." 31 grams of ground beans with 517 grams of water produced a little more than 16 fluid ounces of brewed coffee. The bloom did inflate pretty substantially, which is more common with darker roasts and their excess of carbon dioxide, but it's not an inherent death sentence.
TASTING NOTES: Not surprisingly, there wasn't a lot of acid in this one. The flavor in general was pretty mild, and unfortunately did suggest medium-dark, with roasty and smoky notes - though they were reasonably light and not overwhelmingly bitter, which was pleasant in its own way. There wasn't a ton else going on, really; a mild citric fruitiness and some hints of toasted nuts, but most of the flavor profile definitely leaned roast. I decided to drop a bit of half and half into the cup just to see how it would play, and it didn't make a huge difference - dairy tends to cut coffee's acid, but this was already a low-acid cup. It did sand off the edges just a bit and highlighted some of the milder toasty flavors and a few chocolate notes, generating a very drinkable cup.
VERDICT: This isn't exactly what I look for in a cup of coffee, but it was very drinkable, especially with a splash of dairy. I think it would make for a really good afternoon cup, if you're that sort of person - like a 2 or 3 pm pick-me-up, sparing you the brightness of a morning coffee in exchange for those classically rich chocolate and roast flavors. Not that it can't work in the morning either, if you don't like super-bright coffees. This is probably about what you would get out of a "medium roast" at a place like Starbucks, flavor-wise. Now, I wouldn't call that high praise - it's certainly not what I shoot for as a roaster - but producing a smooth and drinkable cup of coffee that simply happens to be roasted 30-60 seconds past where I typically enjoy is hardly the worst thing I could have done. The real question is what would have happened had I roasted this lighter. I roasted the Ethiopia Bogale Deyaso to around this point and there were still a lot of non-roast flavors in the profile; this one, maybe not so much. Would it taste like much of anything if I roasted it lighter? It's possible these just aren't the greatest beans in the world, at least for what I'm looking for in the complexity of flavor department, and so maybe the answer is no. I'll still give it a shot the next time, and maybe this will serve as a guide for how to deal with some of the other island coffees. I do have to figure out how to roast them lighter, though. One option is to try and treat them like the Ethiopian washed and baby them at P4 the entire time; the other is to try and do it hot and fast, so they get up to first crack quickly and don't have a chance to overroast like these did. Or I just hit cool in the middle of first crack and trust the beans to finish in the first part of the cooling cycle? I'll have to think about this.
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