eliminate the variables

Well... I'm finally happy top say that after a fair amount of trail and error I appear to be on target and back on track in this mysterious and sometimes frustrating business of home roasting!

I decided to vary the mix a little by increasing the pre-heat temperature of my gene cafe, and by decreasing the roast temperature to 200C

But all this did was produce an uneven roast with some beans slightly toasty, and others slightly under-done, leaving a whole lot of messy chaff still clinging to the cooked beans

And when you're using Tanzanian Kilimanjaro beans to start off with - this can be a very expensive mistake!

All was not totally lost, actually, I hand massaged the beans to remove excess chaff, and I found that they came up much better as an espresso 8 days post-roast, as opposed to the standard 3-5 days which I'm used to

On a more positive note I've resorted to what works and I'm pretty much sticking to this formula from now on, and I've seen my most encouraging result to date with a new batch roast of Guatemalan Cinco Estrellas, which I roasted up today

Sticking to my previously successful formula of 180C pre-roast temperature, and a roast temp of 230C - I'm seeing much more even colouration, with less residual chaffing

I think this is slightly helped by marginally increasing the amount of green beans that I'm using which, I believe, adds to increased temperature stability during the roast

Now I know the Gene Cafe is designed for 300g of green beans each roast, which subsequently lose weight but increase in volume with roasting, but I've avoided weighing the beans and have instead opted for two even 1/2 scoops of beans with the measure provided

By increasing this amount to two slightly heaped spoons, however, I appear to have achieved better than previous results - which may or may not be a function of the Guatemalan beans that I have just started using.

I guess time will tell...

This is probably academic to a lot of folks but you can taste the difference in the cup big time, and to me that's what it's all about at the end of the day:

A fantastic product and a repeatable result that produces great tasting coffee time and time again.

The Guatemalan Cinco Estrellas beans were also quite a bit smaller than other beans I've been using, such as many of those from PNG, so I intervened in the roast time and stopped it short at 16min (as opposed to the 'standard' 17min which seems to work well with many larger beans) - as this is when second crack started to kick in.

Although it was two mins into the cooling down cycle that second crack kicked in good and proper; which is the lovely result that I am always looking for, as the beans tend to continue cooking during the cooling down cycle, so you want to manually stop the roast at first sign of second crack

I'll endeavor to upload some photos to give you'll a better look at what I'm talking about

I've also got some video footage that I'm reluctant to use because from memory I mis-pronounce the name of the beans during my commentary... but stuff it I think I'll up-load it anyway to see what it looks like!