Espresso blend n°1

[Raf]

My first roast of Espresso blend n°1 today (for those of you that don't know: that's Carolyn's house green espresso blend). I was surprised by how even I got the roast with my poor little Imex. I think I took it just into second, judging by the colour and the lack of divots (I saw only one chipped bean). Didn't try it yet, update tomorrow!

[Raf]

I liked the taste - so did K, we cleaned up the batch in under a day and a half. I think I may have roasted it a bit too light, there was quite some fruit in it yesterday when I first drank it. But that may have been due to the short resting period: I didn't get quite so much fruit today. May I ask what is in the blend, Carolyn? In general of course, no need for percentages and origins. I think I saw some Harar beans? And judging from the size of the beans, also some Colombian? (I'm probably miles off )

[alans]

My first batch I thought was a little under roasted, took it to the start of second crack but some of the beans were still at the end of first. I found it more complicated roasting a blend, first crack on some beans was very loud but then for others I wasn't sure if it was first or second and the disadvantage of Alp roasting is I didn't have colour as a back up indicator.

Anyway I may try a popper roast so I can better see what's going on and work from there.

[carolynb]

Glad you both like the blend we are selling rather a lot of it! I have replied privately to Neku about the blend, but if anyone else would like a rough list of ingredients please send me a PM!

[simonp]

Resurrecting an old post here, but though it relevant having recently purchased some of this , and roasted some.

This is quite an easy pre-blend to roast, I just used my usual "Hottop" clone profile, and backed the heat off a bit through 1st which helps even up the roast, then quite a bit of heat to get to 2nd crack a minute or so after the end of first. I took to about 20 seconds of snaps, till the first sign of smoke (not yet to rolling) to make sure the robusta was done.
After 3 days rest there was just the sign of oil on the beans.
I tried this yesterday (3 dyas rest), it requires a coarser grind than my usual roasts. I got a 30 second shortish ristretto, crema was thick and dark. The taste is very smooth, low in acidity, which suits me well, with just a hint of low tone from the robusta. I would descibe it as very nice, but perhaps a little unchallenging. Great for a sweet ristretto, and would be good to serve to people who don't normally drink espresso, but sometimes I like something with a bit more bite, or with the high notes from a Yirgacheffe. I'm also not sure this blend would work with milk.
Maybe a lighter roast would bring out some more top end flaovours,so perhaps I am misjudging it.
Re-reading my comments I seem quite critical of this blend, which is not the case, I enjoyed it very much, and I would quite happily down shot after shot of it, but that is my point, sometimes it's nice to have a "big" enough flavour in a shot not to want any more.

This blend could challenge Hasbean's Espresso Blend as my "lazy" roast when I can't be bothered to do lots of roast for my own blends, especially as it roasts evenly so easily.

[steves]

Right. As most of you couldn't see the images in this post, I've edited. Hopefully you can now. Hmm, probably need to do a bit of a re-write as the images will be at the bottom now. Okay, here goes:

Thought I'd re-resurrect this thread to talk about my first roasting experience, as it happened to be with this blend. Pity I didn't discover it 'til after I'd roasted though

However, I don't think it has been too disastrous, but I'll have to wait and see.

I got hold of a Rival popper for £13 from Argos (picture below). I had planned on a dimmer mod, but it hasn't arrived so I thought I'd give it a go anyway. (It still hasn't arrived - must check if they're out of stock.)

I preheated the machine (not sure whether I needed to do this) and threw the beans in (100g as pictured below) . As I’m not feeling too well, I roasted indoors. To keep the chaff under control I decided to use a vacuum cleaner – holding the pipe just above the chimney. The vacuum had two effects:

1. It possibly drew air through the popper more quickly, reducing the temperature slightly. (The roast took about 8 minutes, which is a little longer than I seem to remember others saying it takes with an “un-modded” popper?)

2. It made it very difficult for me to hear what was going on. (All I could tell was that there were various pops, some quite loud, throughout the process – though it would’ve been helpful to have realised that the different beans in the blend would behave differently.)

Anyway, the results can bee seen below.

A few of my observations:

1. The beans certainly looked under-roasted when I tipped them out but they have continued to darken (or is this my imagination?)

2. I was expecting the smell of roasting coffee to be the same as that of roasted coffee, and was surprised that it wasn’t – or should I be roasting until it smells like roasted coffee?

3. The beans smell very nutty, or perhaps rather more malty

Any comments or advice are more than welcome.

Steve

Update - after their statutory 48 hours (nearly) I gave them a try. No visible signs of oil on the beans - quite dry looking. Consistent colour throughout when broken. Slightly pungent smell of baked lemons. When ground the coffee definitely looks a little on the pale side. First shot in 22 seconds, with plenty of crema, but a little over-extracted. Taste - lots of acidity and fruitiness but quite thin.

Any observations are welcome, but in particular:

1. Do beans continue to darken after they've been roasted and are cold?
2. Does acidity reduce with a darker roast (ie is this, and the other things, a sign that I've under-roasted?)
3. Will it help if I continue a roast until I get smoke and see what that gives me?
4. How much of a smell of roasted coffee should I be getting? (Didn't seem to get much)


.

[Ian]

Hmmm... I'm not getting any pics. Is it me? I'm getting

[steves]

Oh. Well they're showing up on mine alright, which is, of course, very useful to everybody else...

Any thoughts Phil?

Steve

[Raf]

I get the tripod thing too.

[phil]

Any thoughts Phil?

Not really. All Steve has done is to link this page to the server where he's stored his images. He *could* simply have uploaded them to TMC via the attachment facility of course (like Ian did), but the result looks quite good in this case. The page may load a little more slowly because the browser has to go off and fetch the image from another server, but actually it seems quite quick.

There are no relevant errors in the generated HTML on this page. I don't have any immediate idea as to why Ian should be having problems. My system loads the images correctly in both Firefox and IE.

Ian - would you mind dropping me a line about your PC's configuration (OS, browser, any things like firewalls, antivirus or other malware control software)?

[tisri]

I'm getting the same as Ian. I'm using Win2k, Netscape 7.1, Norton antivirus etc.

[MKSwing]

I'm getting the same as Ian. I'm using Win2k, Netscape 7.1, Norton antivirus etc.

Same thing on a mac using Safari.

[Gouezeri]

Phil,
You don't want to hear this, but same here on gentoo with firefox
D

[wang]

I'm getting it too, just go into the properties of the tripod banner, copy and paste the url into a new window and the picture should display.

[phil]

Weird one this. I got the same problem myself on my laptop, but moments later on my desktop I get the images fine.

(f y i laptop is WinXP SP2 + Firefox 1.0, desktop is Win 2K SP4 + Firefox 1.0).

What I can say is that the image is served directly by Tripod's server, and that the HTML is quite good enough. So I don't think this is a TMC issue *at all*. It's something weird to do with Tripod, dunno what.

Recommendation / request: SteveS, please can you edit your post to upload the images to TMC as attachments instead of using image links, please? That way we won't hit this problem, whatever the devil it is.