Laos Paksong Typica

Beans: Laos Paksong Typica
Varietal: Typica
Elevation: 1200 masl
Process: Washed
Retailer: Sweet Maria's
Pre-Roast Weight: 230 grams
Roast Attempt: 85th
Roast Date/Time: May 14, 2022, 1730 CDT

My last order from Sweet Maria's, which I had been sitting on for a couple months while I tried to clear my green coffee backlog, was motivated by this batch - coffee from Laos!  I've said it before and I'll say it again, but I am just a massive sucker for provenance, and I've only seen Laotian coffee on offer a handful of times before, and never green.  The ability to try it for the first time out of my own roaster was way too tempting to pass up, and while I knew I wasn't going to want to roast it right away while I was working through the backlog, I had to order it when I did or it would sell out, so I did.  And now here we are.

Because the elevation is comparatively low relative to most non-island coffees I roast, I decided to try starting the roaster on P4 (75% power) instead of P5 (100%).  I set the timer for 20:00 and began with manual control.

Chamber Temperature

19:00 - 98
18:00 - 125
17:00 - 156
16:00 - 181
15:00 - 203
14:00 - 221
13:00 - 235
12:00 - 224

Reasonable numbers from a P4 roast.  When the vent opened at 12:30, I increased the drum speed but kept the heat at P4 for the time being.

Exhaust Temperature

12:00 - 185
11:00 - 258
10:00 - 291
9:00 - 311
8:00 - 323
7:00 - 334
6:00 - 341
5:00 - 348
4:00 - 352
3:00 - 356
2:00 - 363
1:00 - 370

The yellowing phase was reached around 10:30; a little later than you see on a P5 roast, but a good spot for it.  After that, not much happened for a while.  Finally around 4:45 the acridity in the exhaust started to ramp up.  When the A temp hit 350, at 3:45, I bumped the heat to P5 to try and get that launch into first crack.  As usual, it only sort of worked.  The first loud pop didn't come until 1:30, and there was not really a clear first crack with an obvious start or stop; pops continued all the way until the time ran out at 0:00 and the machine sent itself into the cooling cycle.  A temp peaked all the way at 386 (first crack really bumped up the heat, not shockingly).

Complete Roast Time: 20:00
Post-Roast Weight: 194 grams
Loss Percentage: 15.7%

That is not what I want to see, although it's worth remembering how small the actual numbers are that generate these percentage differences.  The difference between the post-roast weight for this and the Milles Collines peaberry was all of five grams - it's sort of hard to believe that that could make the difference between a perfect medium roast and a borderline undrinkable (for me, anyway) medium-dark.  I've had loss percentages like this work out before, but usually there was something else going on - very large and/or moist beans (although it didn't work out that way with the recent PNG roast, which was only 15.2%) or just a crap-ton of chaff (my first try of a Yemen was 15.9% and somehow came out as a light roast).  These beans didn't seem to have either of those caveats.

Laos Paksong Typica

These were the beans on Monday morning, a day and a half off roast.  And... they looked like a medium roast!  They smelled like a medium roast, even after grinding!  I brewed 31 grams of beans in the V60 with 510 grams of water, producing 16 fluid ounces of brewed coffee.

TASTING NOTES: Not only did the beans not taste dark, they arguably tasted light - there was no flavor of roast at all, and indeed the profile was quite tea-like, with a light body and overall mild flavor.  Up front was a small pop of lemon acidity, with raw sugar and honey sweetness arriving a little later in the cup.  As it cooled, I detected a slight note of smokiness, but not in an unpleasant way at all.

VERDICT: I'm not really sure why these beans ended up more like a medium-light, but I'll certainly take it.  The flavor maybe wasn't quite as strong as you might like - the overall profile could be somewhat indistinct, other than reminding me of tea, and it was one of those coffees that a lot of people probably wouldn't even recognize as coffee if you told them it was tea instead.  I was reminded of some of the flavor from the Nepalese coffees I tried a couple years ago, and I think those two production areas have at least some things in common, terroir-wise.  It's not your average coffee, but it certainly makes for a fun change of pace, and I was glad I didn't overroast it!

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