I’m pretty confident I hear first crack, but will admit it I remark it on occasion if I feel I noted it too early initially. The coffee tastes sufficiently developed to have passed first crack though. I dont get much of the grassy, bready flavours that characterise an underdeveloped roast.
I’m terms of wattage, I usually have about 1235W with the dimmer switched off and drop the wattage at 20W increments to control the temperature rise. I don’t use specific watts as a guide given different ambient temperatures, but instead watch how the exhaust temp rises on the machine.
I aim to have roast times as follows –50% drying phase, 25% maillard and 25% development period for the roasts. I usually aim to avoid 2c in part due to the scorching issue. This means a really slow ror after 1c. I would love feedback on whether that is a good approach for a medium roast! And would be interested in how others go about it.
Finally in terms of charge temp, I use the stop function on the gene cafe rather than estop. The stop function ends the cool down cycle at 100c, so depending on how speedy I can be, the 250g of beans go in at around 85-90. The final cool down cycle goes all the way to the bottom to avoid heater damage.
I’d be interested in views on the above the wealth of info out there on these machines seems to miss a bit on dimmer profiles, so views on the topic would be interesting!
I’ve just bought 5kg of a this Natural castillo, so will be testing profiles going forwards.
