Ethiopia Gera Genji Challa

Beans: Ethiopia Gera Genji Challa
Varietals: Ethiopian Heirloom
Elevation: 1900-2100 masl
Process: Washed
Retailer: Sweet Maria's
Pre-Roast Weight: 234 grams
Roast Attempt: 50th
Roast Date/Time: October 3, 2021, 1500 CDT

For my "milestone" 50th roast, I wanted to do something a little special.  Fortunately, I had just the thing.  Some washed Ethiopians had popped up on Sweet Maria's recently that sounded so good I simply couldn't resist.  Not only that, but their social media team pushed out an older article with tips for how to roast washed coffees from Ethiopia, which suggested that my usual way of roasting light - hot and fast - was not the way to keep all those delicate, subtle flavors you want out of a truly excellent washed Ethiopian.  I'm reminded of the Yirgacheffe I did back in July that I thought came out good but not great, and notably missing some of the more delicate notes (perfumey, floral aromatics) that Sweet Maria's described.  That wasn't the hottest, fastest roast, but it was certainly more so than what I was about to attempt here.

Unlike usual, I started the roast on P4 - 75% power to the heating element.  The manual control and one-pound setting, to give me 18:00 on the timer, were the same as usual.

Chamber Temperature

16:00 - 116
14:00 - 172
13:00 - 194
12:00 - 213
11:00 - 228
10:00 - 226

If you look at any other roast I've done, all of which started on P5, the difference is immediately obvious.  The 10:00 temperature, for instance, was 45 degrees lower than the reading from my Yemen roast of two weeks ago, and that turned out to be a pretty amazing light roast.  But the Sweet Maria's site cautioned against hitting the beans with too much heat, saying that Ethiopians are less forgiving than many other origins and also shouldn't be dried too fast.  So I was aiming for a slow development.

At some point, though, I simply had to increase the energy in the chamber.  Ordinarily I increase the drum speed when yellowing occurs, but at 9:30 on the timer (already 8:30 into the roast!) it still hadn't quite arrived, so I went ahead and sped up the drum.  About 30 seconds later, the beans looked like they had gotten to the yellowing phase.

Exhaust Temperature

10:00 - 174
9:00 - 248
8:00 - 284
7:00 - 303
6:00 - 316
5:00 - 327
4:00 - 334
3:00 - 343
2:00 - 352
1:00 - 359

Another thing suggested by the Sweet Maria's page was to kick up the energy as you approached first crack - the goal being not to have a slow, staggered entrance into first crack but a quicker, robust one.  I try and plan out my roasts in advance, although the more deliberately I try to plan for a roast with which I'm trying something newer, the more I end up needing to improvise.  In this case, my idea was to push the heat back to P5 to give the roast that kick into first crack.  But how long to wait to do that?  I settled on 330 degrees on the A temp, usually about 30-ish degrees shy of where first crack starts. This happened at 4:30 on the timer.  But with the timer at 1:00 left, first crack still hadn't started!  Hastily I added two minutes, pushing the timer back up to 3:00 left.

2:00 (18:00 into roast) - 368
1:00 (19:00 into roast) - 377

Finally, at 1:45 (18:15 into the roast), first crack started - and it was indeed fairly robust, one of the louder and more consistent first cracks I can remember recently.  Sweet Maria's also suggested taking some energy back out after first crack started so as to prolong the crack, although given that I'm only working with half-pound batches there are only so many beans to pop.  Still, I dropped the heating element back to P4 after 15 seconds, and first crack did in fact end up lasting pretty much the entire 1:45 left, giving me a full 20-minute roast, my longest ever.  Oddly enough, for some reason the unattended error (Err7) on the roaster kicked in right at zero on the timer - this doesn't matter much since what Err7 does is send the roaster into a cool, which is what I wanted to happen anyway, but it was sort of strange given that I had been pressing multiple buttons indicating the roaster was quite obviously not unattended and that I had already seen and turned off the unattended alarm earlier in the roast.  Whatever, really, but at least I'll know if I ever see that again.  Home roasters used to get quite mad at the Behmor for terminating (and thus ruining) roasts with that auto shutoff feature; fortunately it only happened at a time when it didn't affect a roast for me.

Complete Roast Time: 20:00
Post-Roast Weight: 204 grams
Loss Percentage: 12.8%

Based on loss percentage that's certainly the light roast (maybe just into medium-light) that I was shooting for.  I'm fairly confident this coffee is going to be good - but will it retain those aromatic floral notes?

Ethiopia Gera Genji Challa

These were the beans on Wednesday, three days off roast.  The color was, admittedly, a bit darker than I might have expected or hoped for with a light roast, and I did notice a couple of small oil spots, indicating that a handful of beans had gotten hot enough to approach or even hit second crack.  At just 12.8% loss I would probably call this medium-light rather than full medium, which certainly isn't bad for an Ethiopian... but might be too much to retain all the aromatics I wanted.  I ground the beans to my usual 5/6 medium-coarse for brewing in the V60, brewing 31 grams of beans with 517 grams of water to produce 16 fluid ounces of brewed coffee.

TASTING NOTES: The cup had a strong dark chocolate lead, with hints of honey and nectarine emerging from underneath.  As I continued drinking, the fruit sweetness seemed to fade into a more herbal profile that reminded me of fresh mint.  Then that slid a bit into a more bitter aromatic that seemed likely to be what Sweet Maria's described as tasting like rue in their notes (based on a Google search for "rue flavor," since I don't think I have personal experience with that taste).

VERDICT: The good news is, on the whole this was a nice cup of coffee.  The question is whether I really managed to do what I was trying to do.  There were definitely some floral aromatics, but rue seemed to predominate, and that doesn't feel like the most delicate aromatic out there.  There was more bitterness to this cup than I was expecting - not in the bad, overroasted way, but nonetheless - and the acidity was surprisingly hard to describe or even notice in the usual way.  (That aspect of the cup was the most notable contrast to the Sweet Maria's description, which praised the beans' "impressive, juicy acidity.")  I liked it, but I can't say I loved it.  The question is whether this was a process failure or whether I just had inaccurate expectations of what this cup was going to be like.  The Sweet Maria's cupping notes suggest notable acidity at every roast level, so maybe it's just a tasting failure on my part.  I'll have to think about it some more on the next brew.