hi, i'm neal wilson with wilson's coffee & tea and in this video i'm going to demonstratea procedure for developing a roast profile. so what is a roast profile anyway?a roast profile is just a record of how a coffee was roasted. mostimportantly,
temperature to roast coffee beans, that tells you what the bean temperature is over time. how hot is the coffee at anygiven moment? you can also record other informationon that. if you have access to the temperature inother parts of the roaster
such as the air temperature the exhausttemperature you can have those in your roast profile as well. those are not necessarilythings that you'll want to match on future batches. it's not asuseful as the bean temperature but it can provide some additionalinformation that helps you match that bean temperature. similarlyyou might have access to the control data such as fuel settings, air flow, there are alsoroasters that have color meters built into themso you can tell what color the coffee
beans are at any given time and that canalso be useful if you have it.so how do you create a roast profile? there are a fewdifferent options here. you can record the time and temperature at just a few key points: perhaps justthe temperature that you drop the beans at,where it bottoms out, and a few key points such as whenchemical reactions start to occur, first crack, second crack, when you'reending. the benefit of that is that you have avery compact
record of the roast but you also don'thave a lot of detail there. another approach is to record thetemperature data at regular intervals. you might record the temperature every15, 30 seconds. do that very regularly throughout theroast. another option and what we're going tobe using here is automated computer logging.with automated computer logging you don't have to worry so much about the mechanics of creating the roast profile. you canfocus more on the act of roasting itself.
with the software we're using here, all of thatroast profile data goes into a databasethat makes it much easier to keep track of what you're doing over time. it letsyou easily pull up the information on any given batchof coffee. so why use a roast profile? a big reasonhere is consistency when you have a roast profile you can duplicate thatprofile creating the same bean temperaturesover time as your target profile and that will help immensely in
getting the same coffee on everybatch you can also have some additional checks onthe consistency keeping track of percent weight lost, bean color cup character, things like that. simply using a roast profile gets youconsistency now that might be consistently good, itmight be consistently awful, but every batch is the same. youdevelop a roast profile to get quality. what is the best way toroast this particular coffee? so we're goingto start roasting
this coffee. what i have here is a very nice coffee from bolivia. so we enter the green coffee we're using, the weight of that coffee and now we're ready to start our profile development batch. toward the end of this batch i'm going to pull several samples and these are going to be identified by the letter b and a number.we can set that up in our data logger. several minutes into the batch we cansee what's going on in our data logger.
on the top with your most recent set ofmeasurements. i have two thermocouples on this roaster so i can read the beantemperature and the air temperature i also have the time since the start of the batch.there's also a table view that shows the time, bean temperature, air temperature and control annotations.i have that set to show one measurement every 30 secondsplus any measurement that's associated withan annotation. that can be adjusted to show more orless data. we also have a graph view of the data as it's coming in.
the lower curve here shows the beantemperature and the upper curve shows the airtemperature. since heat transfer is mainly from the hot roasting air into the coffee bean theair temperature is generally going to be higher than the bean temperature. what exactly those temperature measurements are that's going to vary from roaster to roaster and it's going to vary depending on how well the probes are placed, drum geometry,all of that can
have an effect on that. now we're ready to pull some samples.what i'm trying to do is get samples across a range from lighter than i'm looking for through darker than what i'm looking for and with this particular coffee i'mlooking for two roasts. i'm looking for one good medium roast something that has a particular flavor characteristic that my customers are accustomed to for this
particular coffee and i'm also looking for a darker roast something where youcan clearly tell that this is a dark roast coffee but you can also still tell that the coffee comes from bolivia. so here i'm marking in the data logging software when i start pulling my samples. and i need enough of each sample so that i can cup these later. you'll note that i'm not particularly concerned with cooling these beans.
because in a real batch it does take some time to cool the beans off. with these smaller samples the cooling can happen much faster. so i'm going to pull all of my samples and when i'm done with that i'll shake the coffee beans and that will get them cooled off in about the same amount oftime as a production roast on this roaster. now we can see the data that we collected.
we have 12 samples here and the data is saved for future recall. next we need to cup all of these samples. and you'll note that i'm not using a cupping form here. by the time the coffee gets to this point we should already know that the coffee itself meets our qualityexpectations. we're really just trying to figure outhow to roast the coffee.
so i'll taste all of these samples that we'vepulled. so what i'm doing here is i'm just picking out the samples that i like, what meets the criteria that i'mlooking for in terms of a roasted productwhat i'll usually do here is try all of them once then try them again and pull out the onesthat might be good and then as the coffees cool i'llnarrow that down further, tasting the ones that weregood, see how they act as they cool off aand through a process of eliminationeventually we'll pick out the coffees
that i want to replicate so considering the lighter of the 2 roaststhat i'm looking for i like sample 4, i like sample 5 and these are really very close to each other so i'm having a little bit of adifficult time picking between them and this is really just going to comedown to how well they performas they cool off. and it turns out that sample 5 was really nice and we also have a sample 10 that was
that was very nice on the dark side.now here we found a couple really nice samples that wewanted to duplicate but that doesn't always happen sometimes we'll go through that and find that we need to make some changes to theroast profile a lot of this is based on experience youmight know that changing the air flow on your roster doesa certain thing and that that might be beneficial for a particular coffee the other major change is
adjusting how long you spend in certain temperature ranges. having anunderstanding of what's going on chemically duringthe roasting process can really help with that if you know where certain chemicals arebeing synthesized and where those are being broken down that can really help in targeting thosechanges for a coffee i'm less familiar with imight do multiple batches all up front to see how differentparameter adjustments will
affect that coffee. so here what i'm doing is defining in our database of roasting information a roasted coffee item we've had this particular mark in the past soi'm just going to take that out of the list of discontinued items and put it back into the list of current items. now i can enter in the details of the batch. the roasted coffee item, the
green coffee that i'm using, how much coffee i'm using for this batch and once again wedon't have a target roast profile set up so we'll click the no profile button of course we do have that roast profile information. it's just in a different place so we'll load an additional roast profile as our target
pull up the sample batch and load that as our target roast profile and there it is and here what i'm going to be doing is trying to duplicate sample b-5 from that data so we won't be going through all the way. we'll stop it once we're done
so here i'm keeping an eye on the data that's coming in, what the current bean temperature is, what i'm shooting for in my target roast profile, trying to keep the controls nice and steady, trying to match up with our target profile as best i can after several minutes this is what we see in the data logger. we have our target roast profile information in the table and on the graph just as before but we also have new columns in the table with our current data as it's coming in. we also have two additional lines on the graph
showing the current bean and air temperature. i'm trying to match the bean temperature as closely as i can the air temperature i don't really care about these were different sized batches as we can see the initial temperature was much hotter those air temperatures are not going to match up.
but they do help me make control adjustments to keep the bean temperatures lined up. on this particular roaster chemical changes aren't happening until the beans hit 300 degrees fahrenheit so the temperature readings that we're getting before that point don't really matter so much. that's why i'm not worried about the higher starting temperature or the higher turnaround temp. as the roast progresses though we see that the temperatures line up very nicely with the target profile.
so at the end of the roast we can seethat we did a pretty good job. the bean temperatures are lining up very wellwith the target roast profile we hit the same endtemperature at the same time it's not really realistic to expectto get much closer than that. so now that the batch is done we enter ourroasted weight that gets us a percent weight loss andsince i'm happy with how we replicated that batch we can go ahead and save that as a target roastprofile and we won't have to see the extra data from our initialtest batch
when we want to duplicate that inthe future. once we're done with this i'll take that coffee and i'll brew it asa customer might that gets me a final approval on thatroast profile results from the cuping table don'talways translate to a normal brewed coffee so we dowant to make that check and make sure that what we're doing really is going totaste good for the customer this is also a good time to record any quality assurance parameters that wemight be interested in these are very similar to
those checks on consistency that werementioned earlier we'll record the percent weight losssome places will also record the color of the bean there are machines that will measure the color of a coffee there are also color tiles that areavailable that are not quite as precise but are much cheaper. the other thingthat we're interested in keeping track of is what does thiscoffee taste like? here again we don't necessarily mean a cupping form, we're justinterested
in what are the important elements ofthe flavor of this coffee here again we've already determined thequality of the green coffee we're looking for more of a qualitativeanalysis
that we can use for future batches does this coffee taste like the coffee that iroasted last week last month and so on? and with that we'vedeveloped a target roast profile.
