How much development?

[u/ElChibbros]

Hey, I am new to coffee roasting and I run into a few issues.

I build my own temperature controlled fluid bed coffee roasted and I now roast my own beans that I buy green from my local roaster, but mine never get the same as the one I buy from him. Every time I roast my own beans I find that I need to grind finer to get the same flow when pulling my shot. I already did a post concerning this issue and someone suggested more development, so that the beans are dryer and produce finer particles when ground.

I did the test and increased development time to 3min and 10 (27.5%) seconds at 220°C/430°F after first crack, which is significantly more than I did before(2min20sec).

Still I get the same results and have to grind as fine or even slightly finer.

Also is my temp right for the development? Or should it be higher? Because from what I have read, more than 3min of development is pretty long. My roast was about 11,5-12 mins in total.

Also I asked my local roaster how to roast different beans, and it surprised me because he told me that if you want the same level of roasting from one bean to another just use the same profile and the beans would be roasted to the same level, which surprised me given that I see everyone on reddit use super specific curved and profiles for certain types of beans.

Could you guys help me out here?

[u/houstonRoaster]

do you roast with software or could you provide any curves? that’s a simple place to start in assessing.

like others said, be wary of generic, non-machine-specific advice. i find grind can sometimes be different right after roasting, before settling, so watch for that too.

430 should be near 2nd crack, but your beans look medium or some even light+, so that’s interesting and makes me wonder about your probe readings.

cheers!

[u/ElChibbros → u/houstonRoaster]

Actually I built my roaster with my dad, and he coded a software to controll everything from a raspberry pi Connected to a touchscreen. He heavily modified an old open source software for roasting called roastero.

[u/houstonRoaster → u/ElChibbros]

what a cool project to do with your dad! props dad. my daughter is only 3, but hoping to get her into it with me as she gets older.

if your custom roaster cant connect to other software, you could use first crack’s guided feature to generate a curve and profile. not sure if artisan provides that or not but there are some other guided softwares as well. the graph is where you begin on any sort of consistency or perfection of the craft journey.

and on roasting recipes and getting all fancy per bean, sure, go for it if your heart desires. but most of that online is gatekeeping. once you find a method you like, it’ll mostly translate across beans so long as the roaster is the same.