Thought maybe some of you would be interested in this, and since I'm wired up on almost 50oz of french pressed coffee I thought i'd share:
As suggested earlier this week, @HarborTownBrewing and I swapped some home roasted coffee for comparison. We each had 1/2lb of "Costa Rica SHB Montanas del Diamante" from the sampler packs from Roastmasters. We each roasted on Tuesday night and mailed half of the batch on Wednesday. Not surprisingly since we're about 30 miles from each other, it only cost a couple dollars and took 1-2 days to get the coffee via USPS. I brewed some this morning to compare.
(overly verbose) roasting notes from me:
TallDan said:
OK, my batch is roasted. I weighed out 8oz of the Costa Rica SHB Montanas del Diamante, plugged the roaster into the kill-a-watt and started taking some notes. Plugged in, but not turned on, I was showing 122.8v, that dropped to 119v as soon as the roaster was actually running. Pre-heated the roaster on P1 for 1:30, then put the drum and tray in it and started the cycle. At each minute interval, i recorded the temperature reported by the behmor by each of it's probes by holding the A/B buttons, as well as the amperage reported by the kill-o-watt.
13min a:129 b:135 8.9a
12min a:129 b:158 8.9a
11min a:129 b:190 8.9a
10min a:129 b:221 9.07a
9 min a:129 b:248 9.07a
8 min a:129 b:271 9.17a
7 min a:162 b:264 0.9a
6 min a:145 b:268 9.11a
5 min a:149 b:271 .39a
4 min a:160 b:253 9.12a
3 min a:171 b:248 .4a
2 min a:180 b:248 9.11a
--hit c at 1:40, adjusted remaining time to 2:09--
1:30 a:201 b:248 9.14a
:30 a:194 b:255 9.11a
:00 a:208 b:262 .52a
Just before the 8 minute mark, the roaster started humming/vibrating, which it seems to do more often when im doing 1/2lb roasts than 1/4lb roasts, this lasted a minute or so.
Just before the 7 minute mark (when the humming stopped, i noticed the heating elements were switching on and off, which made the power draw go up and down dramatically.
Around the 6 minute mark, the coffee was just starting to turn brown, and was mostly brown at the 4 minute mark.
unattend prompt came up at 3:11
i heard the first pop of the first crack at about 2:30, but then didnt hear anymore until about 2:00. I hit the C button at 1:40 remaining, which bumped the timer back up to 2:09, so from there i took my remaining readings at the :30 marks.
by 1:30 it was well into 1c, by :30 remaining, it had just about stopped, and i got a little bit of smoke.
Post-roast weight was 6.7oz, so split in two that's about 3.4oz of roasted coffee that i'm sending your way.
...and (more reasonable) roasting notes from @HarborTownBrewing:
HarborTownBrewing said:
-1:45 min preheat on P1, then killed it.
-Inserted the drum and tray, along with the beans. Set it for P2.
-Noted 1C starting at 11:45
-Noted 1C ending around 13:12
-Stopped the roast at 13:20.
It's a fairly light roast, and I'm wondering if I should have taken it further, but on the bright side we'll have two different degrees of roast to compare. It looks like your roast stopped 30 seconds after 1C ended, and my roast ended 12 seconds after 1C ended. We both did a pre-heat too, so that should help show the difference between the two since yours went an extra 18 seconds. This was my first time doing a preheat, and I noticed it shaved about a minute off the time it took to get to 1C.
Funny thing is, I've never kept any notes on my roasts before and he's kept them for all of his.
Here's a picture of both of the roasted coffees:
Mine is on the left, his on the right. Sweet Maria's reference card for comparison.
I thought the french press would be the best way to compare. I ground both coffees coarsely (40 on the Rancilio Rocky) and made a press pot of each coffee following the
press pot brewing guide from Intelligentsia. I boiled enough water for both batches so that even with one press pot they were brewed only a few minutes after the another. I accidentally put a little too much water (845g instead of 800g) in mine (which i brewed first), so i did the same with his as well.
FYI: I am not normally this detail oriented with coffee brewing. It's usually a matter of a few scoops of beans and what looks like the right amount of water. I had never weighed the coffee or water for any brewing process.
Coffee brewing:
(coffee cups chosen for functionality in comparison, not aesthetics)
With the coffees both poured into thermally insulated containers right after brewing, I tasted them side by side with their temperatures within a couple degrees of each other. Not surprisingly, they came out very similar in the cup. My batch comes across to me as lighter roasted. I noticed a bit more roast aroma when i was pouring his into the carafe, and I'd say that i smelled/tasted the same in the cup. With less roast flavor in mine, I'd say that I preferred it, but that said, if i wasn't tasting them side by side, I'm not sure that I could tell you the difference between them.
This is not quite what I had expected given that @HarborTownBrewing had concerns that his house wiring might not be getting enough power to the roaster and according to our notes I had roasted about 10 seconds longer than he did. There is a slight possibility that I switched the coffees after grinding them, but i rather doubt that I did.
Again, mine on the left. This picture makes his look a little darker in the cup, but that's just the lighting. They looked identical.
Tomorrow morning, I think that I will make some espresso with them and compare that. Based on my experience so far with home roasted coffees, I am betting that if i can tell the difference, I will have a preference for his coffee over mine.
This was definitely a fun experiment. If anyone else wants to swap some home-roasted coffee in the future, I'd be interested! It might be fun to swap the same coffee roasted with a different roaster/process.
