going after exceptional coffee
My friend Mark has been asking me for a Brazilian coffee that will rekindle his interest in Brazils.. This is one for that… Satisfyingly sweet up front, delicate floral nose, and generally balanced, mild and interesting. More nutty and round in the body (mild)
Roast 2 has more vibrancy and a bit more body. In comparison, the longer development (in roast 1) after 1c muted it’s fruit and floral notes, and slightly muddies the body tones. Not that it’s awful, just not as good.
This is alertness beautifully balanced with elegant patience. Summery. Well structured. It’s clarity cuts through me like sitting in the sun porch on bright mornings. Bright warmth, eye squinty and attentive.
Beautiful, clean, light and floral sweetness. Grapefruit like undercurrent helps round out structure - especially in the mid range temperatures as the cup cools. It shows a lighter body than most other Brazils - even compared to the more citrusy, nutty sul de Minas region or certain Central American coffees - this tends toward the light side. But don’t take this for thin. It has depth and structure.
Said sample of Brazil Carmo de Minas at a light - city plus - roast in order to preserve the delicateness of the yellow bourbon varietal. You can see that the surface color is still mottled as it hasn’t progressed far enough past first crack to even the surface out… Not a bad thing at this stage of roast. The interior is very even and consistent with the surface color.. and by the way, this is the first roast that I am satisfied with since hooking up the Pinhalense…
I found where the chaff has been going… just under the cooling vents, and before the entry to the impeller.. that is the hole in on the left side of the floor.”
Here’s a little slideshow of the new roaster. I’m planning to take some more details this weekend and will post those as well.
cheers
I was trying to edit a batch of images to Flickr with their batch tool, but the commenting was duplicating anything that I wrote (several times), so I gave up for now and simplified the set I was putting together. I am intending to post all my older designs for the drum—sections, elevations as well as these perspectives—but that will have to wait…
I decided not to go with this design pretty much because I changed my mind about the importance of air control with this batch size. I had convinced myself that at this batch size—80g to 500g—that air flow was less important. but while walking over to a friends home for dinner on night a while back, I re-thought my decision. So I am shifting over to a closed system so that I can adjust air flow much like larger roasters. I am not sure if (or how) I will keep the rest of this design. The dimensions of the chamber itself still feels correct to me, and the vane size and placements as well… I had considered possibly moving to something that agitates the beans in a way to keep them moving off the hot surface of the drum. I am leaning though, toward keeping this setup since I like how it maintains a relatively consistent mass - which my theory (somewhat supported by a scientific article (which I will post a link soon, promise) that the coffee will roast more evenly when it does this. Too much agitation will cause it to roast less evenly. so without much adoo, here are the drawings.
(BTW, notice the new fancy image viewer I found! It’s Pictobrowser a flash plugin written by a couple NYC interaction designers that pulls flickr sets into your site—all contained in this neat little package. The wordpress plugin was written by Kumara Sastry. I altered it a bit to get the original size images to load and so you could zoom them and read the notes… I like it a whole lot. It’s nice)
UPDATE_ I finally got all my drawings from sketchup posted and annotated - well, okay some of the annotations are cut and pasted from other annotations, but whatever… - so they are all in the set now. And if you care, now have a flickr account just for Deft.. you can see what’s there, uhh, here.
