turning green coffee beans into delightful cups of coffee

Some people can find a formula that they like, and stick to it. But some of us like to experiment with different beans and different roasts. For us, the challenge is to learn, to keep track, to make notes, to make labels.

I use the Hearthware i-Roast coffee roaster. The good thing about this roaster is that you have the versatility to program temperatures and timing for different phases of the roast. And the bad thing is that if you want to duplicate a previous roast, you have to keep track of temperatures and timing for different phases of the roast!

I like to use my Hearthware coffee roaster outside, but this gives rise to yet another variable. The Hearthware unit gives very different results depending on the ambient temperature of the air outside. If I was roasting on a 70 degree day, I might get the perfect roast. But on an 85 degree day, the exact same settings might give me charcoal. So I started keeping track not only of the temperatures and times that I was programming into the Hearthware roaster, but also the ambient temperature of the air outside.

Of course, the true test is in the tasting. When you brew a pot of coffee, using one of your several jars of roasted coffee, you want to be able to see what roaster settings resulted in this particular success (or failure). See an example here.