Weather warm.
Roasting indoors is a bad idea. The smoke it produces is thick and cloying, it lingers, and I feel poisoned if I breath too much of it. All through the winter, I have been using up all my previous roasts, but suddenly a batch of Vietnam Robusta showed up, and the weather was warming, so I risked it.
Venting over range set up.
Over the stove there is a vent which was sealed up. It would blow cooking fumes out into a small unvented crawl space in the garage. To use it again, I had to run some duct work from the exit of the vent to the access door of the crawl space. All winter long I had been putting that chore off, it was too tight in there, too cold. But snow melting, house needs airing anyway, so in the duct went, and the access door opened.
Roast one batch of Honduras. All good.
My coffee supplier bought up some of the contracts that would otherwise have been in trouble due to the Covid19 shutdowns. One of these was a nice Honduran bean, so I have a lot of that to start up with. The whole set-up on the stove top was new to me, but onward and forward, and 300 grams of green beans got roasted down to 254 grams just after a satisfying rolling first crack sounding like popcorn.
Roast 300g Vietnam Robusta.
Turning the vent fan on seemed to slow the heating of my roaster, so for the next batch I left it off as long as the beans were not smoking. These Robusta beans never seemed to crackle: not a peep until they started to smoke and then, boy howdy, the smoke comes fast and thick after a loud rolling second crack, no evidence of first crack at all.
Rush the roasting cage out to the garage and try to cool the beans down. Directly in front of the kitchen vent outlet! It was a very smokey situation, the garage filled with acrid coffee smoke. I am glad the neighbors did not report me to the fire department!
This Robusta needs to be pulled off the heat as soon as the rolling cracking starts I think. Batch one is black as black can be. I like a dark roast, it is more forgiving, and grinds easily. But these may be charcoal, we will see.
