Hottop Roasting Tips

[JohnB]

Take the Haimi 10 seconds into a rolling 2nd crack. It comes out looking like a Full City+ (not Vienna), no oily marks or droplets at all. It pulls nice, long drippy shots that go well into the 40+ seconds without blonding.

Edit:
Forgot to mention - I stall the roast after 1st crack completely finishes and then ramp the heat element back up with about 1:45 left on the roasting time. The roast finishes @ around 419F (that varies slightly from ambient room temps).

So how much time overall between 1st C taking off & eject. 3-4 minutes?

I'd say closer to 5 minutes.
1st C takes about 1.5 - 2 minutes to complete its thing and then once the cracks stop (or really slow down to almost nothing), the smell of the roast changes (at least in my shnozola ). This is when I cut the heating element OFF and let the roast coast for little over a minute and then crank it up for a slow finish into 2nd C. You'll hit 2nd C at around 1:15 (remaning in the total roast time) and then it'll start rolling into an agressive active 2nd crack with about 30-40 seconds left on the total roasting time. This varies of course depending on your ambient humidity and temps in the area you're working in. Last week I roasted in 57F/65% humidity with those results in the garage.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention: 250g's of Yemen Mokha Haimi.

[JohnB]

With a 250g load how many minutes does it take to get to 300F BT? What are you using for a drop temp? Still going by the HT sensor in the wall when you quote temps or do you have a bt thermocouple installed?

[Niko]

Nope, just using the stock HT thermo built in. I had the iRoar2 rigged with the Fluke but not on this one. It works fine for me and it's consistent enough to get identical roasts back to back. I do manually cool down the HT between roasts with a Vornado fan blasting at full speed, it gets the roaster down to 68F in just a few minutes. The rear filter, chaff tray and top cover is removed for a nice airflow - it really does cool things fast with all this removed and the drum is removed after every Yemen roast since some beans get left behind.

With a 250g load how many minutes does it take to get to 300F BT?

I'd say about 6 minutes -I'd have to look at my notes when I get back home and I'll edit this post.

[JohnB]

I figured it would be up there with a 250g load. I try for a short dry time if I'm going to stretch the roast for espresso. You've got a Variac so you could push the voltage up to 124v or more to speed things up in the drying/ramp up stage. I vac bag & freeze all my greens in 227g portions so thats my max roast size. Typical dry time for brew roasts is 4:30-5:00 minutes, shorter for espresso. I drop anywhere between 325-350F ET which is around 190-205*F on the HT sensor. This gives me a BT changeover between 200*-207+F normally.

I went back & forth between the P & B panels several times but settled on the B full time now. About the only time I use the fan is to remove moisture towards the end of the drying phasing. I prefer to control the temp dialing the voltage up or down with the variac & using the steps on the B panel.