India Mysore Nuggets Extra Bold

Beans: India Mysore Nuggets Extra Bold
Varietals: Cauvery, Kent, S795, S9
Elevation: 1200-1350 masl
Process: Washed
Retailer: Burman Coffee Traders
Pre-Roast Weight: 230 grams
Roast Attempt: 63rd
Roast Date/Time: January 22, 2022, 1500 CST

I've officially been roasting coffee for over a year - my first roast was on December 22, 2020, so my last roast prior to this one was before the year mark, although then I went so long without roasting that this one came at 13 months on the day.  No matter.  It's been a fun experience so far and I look forward to continuing it for many years to come!  This was the last new roast out of my Burman order from October, and it's an origin that looms large in the history of coffee - according to legend, at least, the first person to bring coffee out of Yemen was a Sufi Muslim pilgrim from India who snuck a handful of beans back to his homeland.  And indeed, said pilgrim was from Karnataka state on the southwest coast of India, from where these beans come.  I think I've only had Indian coffee once before and I didn't love it, but that was also from The Roasterie, a popular Kansas City roaster whose output I never really warmed up to for whatever reason.  So let's see how it goes when produced by my favorite roaster: me!

This wasn't an island coffee, but at a medium elevation I was expecting it maybe not to be a super dense bean, so I started the roast on P4 instead of P5, 75% power to the heating element.  I also gave myself 20:00 to work with.  Manual control, of course.

Chamber Temperature

19:00 - 77
18:00 - 107
17:00 - 140
16:00 - 168
15:00 - 192
14:00 - 212
13:00 - 230
12:00 - 219

Pretty much what you would have expected, I think - the 13:00 temperature, the last before the exhaust vent opened, was 54 degrees hotter than the Puerto Rico roast that I started on P3, but 57 degrees less than my most recent roast that I started on P5.  Right in the middle.  For these lower-temperature roasts I haven't been waiting until the beans start to yellow to alter the heat profile; when the vent opened at 12:30, I increased the drum speed.  They were getting into the yellowing phase about a minute later.

Exhaust Temperature

12:00 - 177
11:00 - 255
10:00 - 293
9:00 - 314
8:00 - 327
7:00 - 338
6:00 - 345
5:00 - 354
4:00 - 363
3:00 - 372
2:00 - 379

At 7:00 left, with the beans just starting to turn brown, I upped the heat to P5 for four minutes, then dropped it back to P4 at 3:00 with the A temp having gone over 370 and first crack just starting.  This was a lengthier first crack than I frequently get, about 75 seconds.  I had originally intended to wait 2 full minutes from the start of first crack before sending the beans to cool, because I wanted to roast this batch to the full side of medium, but with 1:15 left the A temp was over 380 and the beans were smelling pretty done - I certainly didn't want to get near second crack, and 45 seconds can be a lot of time at this point in the roast.  So I sent the roaster into the cooling cycle at 1:15.  The A temp peaked at 388, then dropped; I opened the door after 90 seconds as usual.

Complete Roast Time: 18:45
Post-Roast Weight: 196 grams
Loss Percentage: 14.8%

That's right about what I was shooting for - as I've noted often in the past, you can't always tell just based on the number, but it should come out as a full medium.

India Mysore Nuggets Extra Bold

These were the beans on Monday, two days off roast.  The color certainly looked like a nice solid medium roast.  I ground 30 grams of beans and brewed them in the V60 with 500 grams of water, producing slightly less than 16 fluid ounces of brewed coffee.

TASTING NOTES: There wasn't much acidity up front; a mild lemony pop at most.  The body also came out thin.  The profile was kind of just... "coffee."  It had a not unpleasant smooth bitterness, but flavor was indistinct.  As the coffee cooled, some peppery notes started showing up later in the cup, with a light mango sweetness as a bass note.

VERDICT: At first, I thought this was probably one of the worst specialty coffees I've had in a while, or at least one of the least distinguished.  The varietal mix includes a lot of non-Arabica - Cauvery and S9 are hybrids that include Robusta genetics, and S795 includes Liberica - which is always a risk.  But a few things did jump out as I kept drinking that I would say salvaged the experience.  With that said, it says something about how much better specialty coffee is than non-specialty that even one of my least favorite specialty experiences of recent months tasted about as good as anything I would expect to get from Starbucks, say.  Of course, there's also the question of whether I roasted the beans properly, but I think I did.  The Burman website mentions roasting them darker, to the edge of second crack, and while I'm sure that would have produced more of a certain kind of taste, (a) that's not how I like my coffee and (b) the fact that medium-dark/dark is possibly the preferred roast level says something about how much flavor you should really be expecting out of the origin beans.  I think these came out fine for what they were, all things considered.  To be clear, this was not a bad experience at all, just not a very exciting one.  That's gonna happen sometimes, especially when you want to try every origin you can.  They can't all be Kenya!