A New Episode of Roast Profile Development

One of my side projects is a video series called Roast Profile Development. It's an educational series on coffee roasting, but rather than dealing with coffee roasting in general, each episode takes a specific lot of coffee and uses that to explore different concepts in coffee roasting. The goal is to present professional roasters with a variety of product development methods and approaches to thinking about coffee that they can apply when they encounter similar situations with their own coffees. This allows me to get into more advanced topics that other educational resources tend not to touch.

Last night I finished editing a new episode dealing with a coffee from Brazil that has the peculiar property of an excessively large bloom during brewing that makes it difficult to brew in a large batch brewer. I hope that this is not a common problem so some parts of the video might not be immediately relevant to a lot of roasters, but what I tried to do with this was present a general approach to troubleshooting roasting issues that can be applied more broadly. This also presents an opportunity to talk about different approaches to controlling a coffee roaster to achieve desired results including one that most roasters never consider. There are several possible solutions to the problem I'm working through. Some involve changing how the coffee is brewed, some involve changing how the coffee is roasted, and while I certainly have my own preferences in how I've approached this coffee, I wanted to cover a variety of options that others might find acceptable or even preferable to the approach I eventually decided on using.

Previous episodes available to watch on both YouTube and Amazon cover topics such as flavor intensity, balance, and espresso and present some of the context that I left out of the latest episode as the new episode is already the longest in the series without that.

To get better at roasting coffee it's important to not just follow a set routine, but to really think about what you're trying to accomplish and develop new approaches when it seems like it should be possible to produce better results with a coffee. I hope that other roasters will find these videos to be a useful source of ideas that they can use not just to roast coffee better, but to become better roasters. I'd also like to encourage people to share these videos with people who might find them interesting.

Unfortunately, the timing of this release is not great. If anybody has questions about anything in this video there may be more delay than usual in my answering that as tomorrow I'll be flying out of the country to teach coffee roasting classes in Dubai. This might also delay some blog posts. People are still reading the recaps of what was popular in the previous month so I'll have another one of these early in the month. Mastering the Roasting Process with Profile Translation Analysis is so far the most popular post this month by a wide margin. This is a small companion piece to an article I wrote that's available on Daily Coffee News.