Nespresso are perhaps the focus for me, more than the K-cup, because I think they are a more global player – operating retail units in 150 countries, with 10 million+ active members of the Nespresso Club.  I think our side of coffee has underestimated them for far too long.  My company shares more customers with Nespresso than I am comfortable admitting to myself.  I don’t think the quality of Nespresso is amazing – but it is better than most retail espresso and it is better than what someone would get at home with a starter home espresso machine and pre ground coffee, or even a bad grinder.

I don’t want an espresso machine in my house.  I don’t want to wait to heat it up, dial in the grinder, then clean it thoroughly in order to drink an espresso.  I’d rather pay someone else to deal with the challenges of espresso, so I go to a cafe for my espresso.  Most people around the world don’t have a good cafe close by, or really just want espresso at home.  Lots of these people buy great coffees to drink as drip – they might buy fresh whole bean coffee, well farmed and roasted, to drink alongside their Nespresso.

I remember watching a video as part of the presentation of Nespresso at the Allegra European Coffee Summit and being impressed, demoralised and a little inspired all at once.  Nespresso dominate in one particular aspect of coffee:  accessibility.

They make buying the product as friction free, easy and enjoyable as possible.  They make brewing it as easy as possible.  No skills, no cleaning, just push a button.  As the video showcased their new retail concept it seemed as if they’d made a list of the reasons people might not want to buy their coffee, and then built a store that ticked that list’s solutions off one by one.

Ultimately my point is this:  Nespresso and K-Cups success clearly demonstrate that people are happy to pay more for coffee.  They are happy to pay a lot more.  Their enormous sales volumes are solid evidence of this.  I don’t think we should be angry about how much they charge, unless we’re directing this at our own failures to reach that price point despite having better product.  One could infer that Nespresso’s success implies we’re way too cheap.

I’m not suggesting poor business practices amongst great roasters- but think about the possibilities for sourcing and financing great coffees, or building relationships that drive up quality, that Nespresso’s retail price point would give a speciality roaster. Nespresso have been pretty smart in their purchasing practices – certainly an entirely different animal to their parent company Nestle.

Ric Rhinehart’s quote in the NYT piece gets to the heart of things:  Selling by serving is a lot easier, more tangible and yet somehow more affordable to most people.  Selling by the serving has an out of home retail benchmark. In conversation on this topic Ric pointed out that many people don’t benchmark their K-Cup against a cup of black coffee from Starbucks (less than $2), instead they compare it to what they might have at a cafe, usually something much more expensive ($3.50+).

I don’t think we should be beating the drum of anger about Nespresso and K-Cups retail prices, unless we never aspire to them ourselves.  We should be learning the lessons they provide us – how to sell coffee effectively, how to make coffee at a higher price point more accessible – and answer some less comfortable questions such as why we’re considered overpriced, and why we might be inaccessible in comparison.

 Responses

One Bag at a Time – How much does your coffee cost

Daniel of Arabica – Hoffmann and the Nespresso

Here is the raw data with columns for what the ICO defines as “Ground” coffee, which I presume to mean all fresh coffee, as well as “Soluble” and a combined total of the two.  The units of consumption are thousands of 60kg bags.

Definitely trending up in ground coffee at a higher rate than in soluble, but both growing pretty steadily.  So I graphed out the per capita consumption, using population figures for each year to compensate for population growth.¹

Click for bigger

What is interesting to me about this is the following:

- Consumption in ground coffee didn’t really increase dramatically until 2004, with big jumps in 2006 and 2008.  To put some perspective on the size of the jump in imports, the difference in 2007 to 2008 is 84,000 bags of coffee – over 5 million kg.

- 2008 was also a massive jump in soluble coffee.  I just don’t have the data to explain why the UK’s total consumption spiked at that point.  This seems a good point to highlight that this data is the ICO’s consumption data, not import quantities.  However, import data also spikes a lot here implying that there was perhaps some stocking up to take advantage of the C-market price fluctuations.

- The UK’s per capita consumption is still pretty poor at approximately 3kg.  We’re a long way behind the double digit Scandinavians.

- I’d love to see some sort of quality measure for this period of time for the coffee imported.  People talk about the decline in quality resulting in a decline in consumption in the US, as price competition drove quality down in the second half of the 20th century.  I’d love to know if this is the opposite.  I had a quick look at historical import data but didn’t find anything useful.

- I’d love to see historical data on cafe openings to compare to this.  Interestingly the ICO has out-of-home consumption in the UK accounting for about 30% of consumption, and holding pretty steady there (within 1% variation).  It might amuse people to know that the out of home consumption average for Italy over the same period was lower at 28%.

I’ll finish with an interesting quote that caught my eye from the report – make of it what you will…

Average annual imports by the United Kingdom during the period 1997 to 2010 totalled 3.4 million bags coming mainly from exports by Vietnam (14%), Brazil (11.7%), Colombia (9.4%) and Indonesia (6.1%) as well as from other importing countries through their re‐exports, namely Germany (13.6%), Netherlands (7.6%), Spain (4.1%), Ireland (2.4%), France (2.3%) and Italy (2.1%). In other words, among the ten leading countries supplying coffee to the United Kingdom, re‐exports from other importing countries accounted for 32.2% of the total compared with 41.2% from exporting countries.

1. I do love Wolfram Alpha….

Unsurprisingly I have a few air miles stocked up, and with Anette travelling (Sumatra and Kenya) I had some weekends to spare and the chance to travel very cheaply indeed.  The first trip I took was over to see the Coffee Collective.  This is embarrassing:  Despite being in Copenhagen for the WBC in 2008, and being there again for NBC last year, I had never been to the Coffee Collective’s shop on Jægersborggade.  This needed to be fixed. It was good to see both of their shops, drink some tasty coffee, cup a bit and just hang out in their shops.

This weekend I went to visit Oslo, and of course see the Tims at Tim Wendelboe.  I also managed a quick visit to Java (thank you again for coffee!) and also Kaffa (thanks Björnar!) – I love seeing other roasteries because I’m fascinated by the different way companies overcome challenges and manage processes.  I hope I’m not alone in finding weigh and fill machine workflow interesting….

Again – embarrassing:  This was my first visit to Tim Wendelboe.  I hadn’t been in Oslo since August 2006 - before Tim had found a space.

These are both businesses that I feel a bit of an attachment too, if only because they’ve been operational for a similar amount of time.  They’re run by people my own age, and the whole WBC connection is a thing I suppose.  They are both businesses that have inspired me over the years, as well as made me jealous or annoyed that their coffees were so good.  They’re also run by people who’ve been totally honest in their feedback when tasting our coffee – for better or worse – which is an absolute rarity in this industry, and indescribably valuable.  We face, in some ways, common challenges – though each have different markets and consumption trends.  For example – London may have the advantage in population density but we don’t have a strong culture of brewing, serving or drinking drip coffees which obviously impacts buying practices.

On both occasions I brought our coffees to taste.  On both occasions the coffees had been roasted on Thursday, I had cupped them in London on Friday and then cupped them again on Saturday in either Copenhagen or Oslo.  The impact of water on the coffees blows my mind.  Worrying about water isn’t new – brewing coffee with London water pretty much obliterates any interesting or unique flavour characteristics in a coffee.  In Copenhagen we were cupping with reverse osmosis treated water (we have similar systems) and in Oslo the water is very soft, and just taste/odour filtered.¹

Technically both times the water was within spec – not too hard, not too much TDS.  The coffees in Copenhagen were suddenly flat, though we later cupped one at different water TDS quantities and got better results from a slightly higher TDS than the Collective would usually use.  This higher TDS would turn out to negatively affect their coffees.  In Oslo one coffee noticeably improved (I had worried it was bordering on a touch light in London), others were good and one tasted  much worse.  I know water effects coffee taste – it was just shocking to be reminded how much of a difference small changes make.

This wrecks my head.  The idea that each company is roasting based on a feedback loop of cupping, and in each case water is throwing a variable into the mix.  As much we might roast espresso to work at a certain dose and extraction, we may be roasting coffee to work well with the water in our roasteries.  This probably merits a whole other post when my head doesn’t hurt so much from thinking about it.

The result from each trip was the same – I was inspired, full of ideas and grateful for the chance to talk about all the stressful stuff of running a business with like minds.  On each occasion I am exceedingly grateful for the incredible hospitality shown by my hosts.  I’m looking forward to seeing them in London soon, and I definitely won’t wait so long to go back….

1. I am aware that flying with these coffees may have had an effect, but I am increasingly skeptical of the excuse of air travel on poor cup quality

Please, please use the handles on cups.  Please don’t hold cups any other way. Holding the cup with your fingers around the rim is not professional.  It doesn’t help you pour latte art better, it is just a habit – it may take some breaking but it is worth the effort.  (I think pouring while holding the handle actually helps with symmetry).

I have big, fat, useless fingers and I don’t find handles a problem.  This is not an acceptable excuse.

So please – can we work to get rid of this habit?

When I was down in New Zealand last year I was lucky enough to be able to attend the SCAA’s Instructor Development Program course that was being run there.  It was great to do a course that combined solid educational theory, but put together by people sympathetic to the specific challenges of coffee and barista training.  I cannot adequately describe how much I enjoyed it.  Barista training is still a part of my day to day work, and learning about how to train has been on my list of “stuff to do” for a while.

I feel much more capable in my capacity to create a training program, structure lesson plans and how to teach in a way that has direct, effective outcomes.

I’m pleased to announce that we (Square Mile) are going to help host the SCAA’s course in London.  The course is a single day and will be run twice on the 2nd of 3rd of March.  The venue isn’t yet confirmed but will be either in Central London or just out by the Roastery.

Tickets are available now.  Discounts are available for SCAA members, but the course is open to anyone:

Friday

Saturday

UPDATE:  You need to register to use the SCAA website – this is like signing up for a forum, and not signing up for membership.  The fee is for the course only – not for membership.

To clarify – I/we do not profit from ticket sales.  We just wanted to see this program be available to those in the UK/Europe.

I believe this is the best $200 ($185 for SCAA members!) that you can spend on learning in coffee – especially if you do any sort of training as part of your profession. I suspect that this may appeal to people across Europe so I think places may fill up quickly.  I’d recommend moving fast if you’re tempted.

I never intended this blog to be “all broadcast, no discussion”.  It was started because it seemed a way to focus and catalogue my learning in coffee.  It soon became a tool to interact with people all over the globe.  It accelerated my learning by connecting me with baristas, roasters, producers and others in the industry.  At points it became a hub for interesting, and occasionally important conversations.  Some of my favourite things about the blog have been the comments in the past.  Why, then, would I get rid of that?

I’m interested in using this blog to ask questions.  I ought to be focusing on questions that can’t really be answered in the short form of a blog comment. Twitter has filled that niche pretty nicely.  I believe, increasingly, that if you’ve put a lot of time and effort into writing a long blog comment then you should probably take that extra small step and publish it on your own blog.  Setting up a blog takes barely 5 minutes on a service like Tumblr or WordPress or even Google+.  Often we’ll change what we write because it is a blog comment.  We’ll simply, we’ll shorten or just ignore things that are important because it is just a blog comment.  Sadly commenting will often sufficiently scratch the itch of needing to respond to the point, that a fuller explanation rarely follows.

If I were to implement a “No Comments” policy I would make sure to add links to people’s blogs who’ve posted great replies at the bottom of my post.  I’m interested in discussion, in considered long form responses on various topics – but if you’ve taken the time to create it then you should own it and control it and its presentation.

This is not about me looking to turn off public criticism of my thinking or my ideas.  There remain many effective ways to tell me you think I said a stupid thing, and I plan to listen to you if you say that.  I wish to remain part of a discussion, rather than to appear to be just barking out my coffee “wisdom” at the world.

There is some pretty interesting reading on the topic on here.  Articles like this have certainly influenced my thinking, and the contrary opinions posted leave me with nagging doubts.  I don’t think there is a clear cut answer on the subject, but I think the link is a great read.

I confess I’ve noticed a tendency in myself when it comes to reading comments on other blogs:  the more comments there are the less likely I am to read them.  Services like Disqus might do a pretty good job of sorting by quality but I’ll still rarely read comments – limited time and attention often win out over trying to fight through the signal to noise ratio.  While my useful of Instapaper to read long form stuff probably plays a role in this (which doesn’t save the comments, only the article’s text),  I have to accept that if I don’t really read comments on other blogs then perhaps I am over-valuing them to readers on my own.  Maybe they are also feeding a need for personal validation in my writing that might be unhealthy.  I say maybe, but really mean probably.  I look back on so many posts where I’ve openly asked for comments and now it just looks a bit needy.

Most articles about Comments Off bring up the idea of controlling how your site looks.  This is my website and I pay my money every year to cover the costs of hosting it.  I paid someone to make it look better and hopefully be easier to read.  I refuse to put ads on here, despite the fact that I could probably make some decent money doing so, because I hate how they look, and dislike the message they send.  From an aesthetic perspective comments remain pretty hard to crowbar in, to make easily readable and a desirable visual addition.  They slow the page loads too – something that bothers me more and more.

I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to contribute in the past with a comment on my blog.  I’ve learned a lot. Over the last 7 and a bit years I have posted 764 posts and received 7.634 comments on those posts in total.  I want to make clear that if you’ve left a comment here in the past day, week, month or year – please don’t take this as me being ungrateful or rude – it is not meant that way.  Should I take the step to turn off commenting for future posts I’ll make sure that all previous comments are archived, and will always be available.  I’ve not yet made my final decision but at the moment I am strongly leaning towards turning them off.

I’ve turned comments off on this post (doing otherwise would seem a little odd), and I expect to take a little heat for this on twitter and via email too.  I’ll do my best to respond where I can.

My thinking in this revolves around the fact that we often talk about how a certain brewer could highlight certain aspects of a coffee’s taste and quality. I want to explore this idea in a little more depth, because this is such a fuzzy idea that I don’t think it is particularly helpful.

I’m going to avoid talking about specific manufacturers of equipment, primarily because I have a conflict of interest in this area.

I should also point out that a great deal of this post can be written off as anecdotal, and I’m more than happy to discuss contradictory experiences or opinions.

What do you want to highlight?

I figure the best place to start is by taking a slightly more objective look at the potential characteristics of a coffee that we might be highlighting. Most scoresheets used for cupping exist to assess green coffee but there are sheets used for other purposes. There are certain common attributes that are assessed:

- Sweetness
- Acidity
- Mouthfeel/Body
- Balance
- Aroma
- Flavour
- Finish

When brewing a coffee we should be thinking about how the process impacts each of these attributes and presents.  How do we influence each of these factors with our equipment and technique?  This is a more difficult question to answer, because it is all so interconnected.

Most of the above attributes are primarily linked to extraction.  The coffee itself is obviously the determining factor of how much sweetness is available, or how much positive acidity is available for us to capture in the cup but the quality and quantity of each of these in the brew is tied to extraction.

Extraction remains a sticky topic.  I believe that uniformity of extraction is important, and also that whatever people consider their desirable range of extraction is tied heavily to the grinder and its particle size distribution.  Regardless of what your desired level of extraction is, there are certain factors that have a strong influence when we are brewing.  Two of these are deeply interconnected:

- Grind Size
- Contact Time

The first two have the most obvious connection – the grind size determines surface area of coffee exposed and the rate at which solubles extract, and with all brew methods we must be careful to balance our grind size and our contact time.  You can brew a french press at a number of different grind sizes and have good results as long as the contact time is appropriate.

The moment you read that another thought might pop into your head – which is that surely brew time has an effect on brew temperature.  If I grind very coarsely, requiring a longer steep in my press pot, then surely the average temperature of the brew will be much lower?

Temperature is still something that we don’t really understand in brewing coffee.  We’re happy to talk about espresso brewing temperatures, yet references to the brewing temperature of drip coffees is remarkably absent from published recipes or discussion.  Temperature has a brute force effect on extraction – it supplies energy required for a soluble to enter a solution, so generally the more heat you have the more extraction you have.

Along with overall extraction we have the extra effect of thresholds of temperature required for certain compounds to be extracted.  The best example of this are the negative, bitter qualities we extract from even light roasted coffees when the brew temperature is very high, up towards boiling point.  Brewing at lower temperatures – 80C/175F for example – allows a reasonable mechanical extraction of the coffee, resulting in reasonable body, simplistic sweetness but overall a cup lacking complexity and character.  This experiment also highlights the unusual effect of temperature on acidity.  Brewing at temperatures like these doesn’t result in the sour cups we might come to expect, instead the acidity is notably absent – requiring more temperature to be fully extracted.

Back to Brewers

Temperature often seems to be a separate factor from brew method – more a function of technique and recipe rather than the brewer itself.  This is mostly true – your brewing temperature is determined by the temperature of water you start with, and the thermal mass you achieve in your brewing liquor/slurry.  A pourover brew with the bed kept very, very low with a slower pour will have a lower brewing temp than a faster pour and a higher cone – presuming water starting at the same temperature.  This is often exaggerated further by a slow pour from a pouring kettle which is losing heat as well.

This isn’t to presume an ideal technique, just to highlight that the brewer doesn’t really control the temperature.  Except for one:  the syphon.  I find it odd that the temperature profile of this brewer isn’t discussed more.  It is rare to brew coffee in an environment where the temperature is held stable across a period of 1 to 4 minutes, as we usually do not add any energy beyond the brewing water to the brew.  Many people dislike the taste, or are simply disappointed by, the taste of coffee from a syphon.  Some might argue that this is because the person brewing lacks the particular ridiculous ninja stirring skills, but more likely the temperature profile of the brew is what is making it stand apart.¹  In terms of combining infusion and pressure driven percolation it is remarkably similar to an aeropress – something which rarely is discussed.

Speaking of stirring we can discuss agitation.  This is a topic that we are a little squeamish about as an industry, because we’ll almost instantly wheel out the words “inconsistent” or “unrepeatable”.  Usually this is in relation to the manual movement of the coffee with a tool – such as stirring the bloom of a pourover, or stirring the slurry of a syphon.  I’m skeptical of magical stirring techniques in any brew, and it feels like we should also be looking at the other agitation going on – when the water hits the coffee.  How we pour, where we pour, from how high we pour – all this and more will affect the movement of the coffee in the bed and more movement will result in more extraction.

Once again – this isn’t really a function of our chosen brew method – more our chosen technique.

So far there really hasn’t been much about the brewing process that is determined by the brewing device, rather than the brewing human.

Filtration

As we look to other attributes of the coffee an obvious place to see the impact of the brewer is the influence filtration medium.   One important aspect of coffee is how it feels to drink – the body, the mouthfeel, the texture.

This is determined by several things divided into two categories:  Dissolved things and Undissolved things.

The quantity of dissolved things determines our strength, the more solubles the stronger the drink will be and the heavier the body and mouthfeel will be.  This is linked the extraction (technique again) and recipe – not the brewer itself.  The coffee determines the composition of the solubles, and certain coffees contain solubles that increase our perception of mouthfeel.  All brew methods produce a cup where the dissolved solids play a fundamental role.

Undissolved solids are interesting too.  The undissolved we most often talk about are the lipids (oils) in the coffee, and also the tiny pieces of coffee that can be suspended in the brew.  These both have strong influences on the mouthfeel of the resulting coffee, not always in a beneficial way.

Paper filters are considered the most thorough way to remove the undissolved solids, resulting in a much clearer brew with an attribute we would often describe as clean.  Cloth filters allow through more of the undissolved materials, noticeably the lipid fraction but also some of the fines too.  However, there is usually so little fines overall that we usually experience a fuller mouthfeel – something most enjoy and I think cloth would be a more popular filtration method if it weren’t for the annoyances of maintaining the cloth and preventing it imparting unpleasant flavours.  This leaves metal filtration which simply removes the largest pieces of suspended material (i.e. the bulk of the brewing grounds) and results in a cloudier, muddier brew that can still be incredibly enjoyable even if that final mouthfeel is probably worth leaving in the cup.

So far, with the various factors discussed, it appears that the brewer has relatively little influence on cup quality compared to technique and few brewers demand certain techniques – instead allowing infinite varieties of recipes, methods of agitation, or brew temperatures to be used.  There is, however, one more distinguishing factor that should be discussed.

Infusion Vs Percolation

This is probably the biggest distinction between brewers, and the most important.  We have brewers that are solely infusion – like a french press – where extraction occurs as coffee infuses into the water.  We have percolation brewers where water flows through a bed of coffee, washing out soluble materials, and we have hybrid brewers where both occur at different stages – such as a syphon where the water a coffee steep, before the heat is removed and the water is dragged through the bed of coffee against the paper or cloth filter.

When it comes to assessing techniques and extraction I think it is fair to say that using infusion it is easier to achieve relatively uniform extraction, compared to percolation.  With percolation something is driving the movement of the water – it might be gravity, or applied pressure – but this means that paths of least resistance are preferable for the brewing water.  We must adapt techniques to allow for this, and help prevent too much uneven brewing.

Uneven brewing is a problem because it is so hard to measure – outside of taste.  I firmly believe that measuring overall extraction is incredibly useful and has many practical applications.  The critics of measurement have often cited our inability to measure evenness as a reason to not bother measuring at all.  This makes absolutely sense to me, but perhaps not hugely on topic. (Clarification:  AndyS points out that this is a horribly phrased, confusing sentence.  My explanation in the comments follows.)

The fact that extraction measurement can’t quantify evenness is not a reason to abandon and ignore a very useful tool that does exactly what it promises: to measure how much of the total coffee was extracted.  Pointing out what it can’t do as a flaw creates something of a straw man argument to me. Same thing as pointing out that it is misused and therefore a bad tool. (which I see online a lot too)

Creating a brew recipe

Have I argued that any brew method should be able to brew any coffee as desired, or have I argued the opposite?  To answer the question I thought I’d look at how I might make a choice about how I would want to present different coffees, and how I’d choose a brew method or recipe.

If I love a coffee because it has a plump, sweet fruit quality then I might choose to brew it using cloth filtration at a slightly higher recipe than usual.  Considering I take 60g/l as my own preferred starting point, I might instead brew at 65g/l to further emphasise the body.  When talking about the coffee I want to highlight a few simple reasons why someone would enjoy it, and then use my prep to make those points evident.  Plush, rich, heavy, jammy mouthfeel is a big promise, but I feel that if fulfilled a great experience would be had.

Conversely, if I loved the light, delicate tea-like quality of a floral coffee then I might drop back to 55g/l, and make sure it was paper filtered and brewed with a relatively hot brewing liquor.  Sometimes reducing concentration can help with clarity.  I’m not saying all coffees like this would be brewed this way, but to instead talk a bit about how we might think about our recipes and analyse our brewing choices.

I don’t think I’ve really come to any conclusion here, nor did I really mean to.  I just wanted the opportunity to write up a few thoughts on brewing and try and give them some structure.  I’m open to input on this, open to disagreement and probably being wrong about a whole heap of things.  On the one hand I feel like I’ve missed out a great deal but on the other hand this post is probably long enough!  I look forward to your feedback!

1. My personal preference for coffees to brew in syphons would be very light roasted, dense coffees, that are often difficult to extract

Recently Anette has started to write up her travels, starting with Ethiopia in November, and continuing last week with Sumatra.  I really enjoy reading these posts, a genuine mixture of her personality, bountiful information and her insight.  (The fact that English isn’t even her first language shames my poor language skills so deeply.)  I also really like that these are written by someone travelling to learn, and looking to share the information collected. I have no idea how she records as much information as she does!

Posting these makes me realise that there aren’t enough posts like this out there, or (more likely) I’m just not looking in the right places.  Feel free to link me up in the comments! (I read Coffee Collective’s posts, Tim Wendelboe’s and Tom Owens mostly)

I think these posts are very much worth reading – yes, yes I am probably extra biased because of who is writing them, but if you put the time in reading them (they’re pretty long) then I’m confident you’ll come to the same conclusion. (That they were worth reading, not that I am biased!)

Sumatra 1
Sumatra 2
Sumatra 3

Ethiopia 1
Ethiopia 2
Ethiopia 3
Ethiopia 4
Ethiopia 5

Instapaper is your friend for this sort of thing!

UPDATE:  I’ve closed this poll.  I will be posting a response to the results pretty soon.

Here is the graph again, properly labelled:

I posted this for a couple of reasons:  Primarily I thought it was interesting.  Secondly I wondered if other people were looking at roast data like this.  I’ve only produced a few of these curves, as I have to do it manually at the moment, and they are confusing to read.  Bear in mind – if the graph were to flatten out it would simply mean that the bean mass is increasing in temperature at a steady rate.  The roast curve would be point up, it would just be straighter.

Other roasts have produced extremely different profiles.  I need to get more data and start doing comparisons!

This is also interesting because there are changes in the rate of the bean mass absorbing heat that don’t correlate to changes in gas or airflow.  I don’t know whether evaporative cooling has much impact on rate, or why we don’t see a faster uptake of heat once the coffee is dry.  The curve on this roast between 6 and 8 minutes is particularly interesting to me.

I should note that this was a test, rather than production roast.  It was dropped not far past 1st crack, as you may surmise from the graph.  We have a colour meter but it doesn’t produce accurate Agtron numbers.  It cupped pretty well, but was out-cupped by a slightly different profile that I don’t have this kind of data for.  (Annoyingly)

Anyway – I thought it was interesting, and I hope it might generate some discussion – because we are really bad at openly discussing roasting theory online.