Kostverlorenvaart

In March last year I wrote about roasting Indonesian beans from Sumatra . These Mandheling beans needed a lot of sorting before the roast but the result was delightful. This year I bought a 60kg bag of Mandheling from a different source, Het Hoofdkwartier in Amstelveen and this shipment was much cleaner. There are very few beans to sort out and I was excited to see how these would roast and taste best. To compare the two, this is a picture of last years's Mandheling: And this year's Mandheling: This was also a good time to explore the "power slider" roast method that was recently enabled with the help of Tije de Jong who installed three SSR's inside the control space of the FZ94 roaster and Marko Luther who built this slider option into Artisan , creating the option to control the PID in such a way that the slider on the computer screen changes the intensity of the heat coming from the three heating elements below the rotating drum inside the FZ9

A wide choice of recent crops of Central American beans were cupped this afternoon at Evermore Thee Koffie Chocolade , Coolhaven 158, 3024 AL Rotterdam. Importer: The Coffee Quest Coffee Imports .

Today the variable pre-infusion pressure on the Londinium L-R came in very handy. I aim my roast to be consistently of about the same roast intensity, measured in a roast color acquired over a certain time. Mostly color Tonino #95 with a 15 minute roast. With a new bean it takes some time to tweak the roast profile and with a Sumatra bean I roasted the first batch rather dark, Tonino #83 even. That's not exceptionally dark compared to many beans sold in shops, they are not oily for instance beyond a tiny spot here and there on a few beans. But these Indonesian semi-washed beans which tend to have lots of 'body' already behave like dark beans, with a faster flow. Before, I would send these to a friend that I know who finds that really dark beans work best in her automatic coffee machine. Now I tried them myself and I find it yields delicious spicy earthy coffee with lots of body even when using just the 15g VST basket instead of the 18g basket that I mostly