turning green coffee beans into delightful cups of coffee

What's "first crack math"?

Hearthware designed my coffee roaster machine to display a "countdown time" on the base of the roaster. However, when we talk about "first crack", "second crack", we mean the time from START.

So the math is:

First Crack Time = Total time of roast (hope you wrote down the three time phases!) minus the time shown on the countdown timer when you hear the beans cracking.

Yuck! What a pain!

This label system has an easy solution.

1. Enter the required information, and print the label.
2. Then use the label to punch in the temperatures and times.
3. Leave the label beside the coffee roaster as it works. The label has a reverse time scale on it, and when you hear first crack, mark the scale.

Now you have a record of when first crack happened, and you can easily read the time scale to see how far into the roast it was. "First crack was one minute into phase three," is more meaningful than "first crack was at minus 3:30 minutes", or "three and a half minutes from end of roast".

To see how this works, print a sample label here.