Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Look! Look! The standard for transparency is farther still

Guess whose blog I snagged this little gem from?
Origins listed in percentiles as contents of the blend. Amazing. I can't wait to see this sort of thing here in the States. It's bound to happen eventually. Right? ...Bueller?

Next step: visible lot numbers along with everything else... and then Agtron numbers. Roast profiles are a bit much. Roast level is almost too much to ask. Is it possible?

7 comments:

Jaime van Schyndel said...

I saw specific dose weight/brew temp/extraction volumes on an espresso bag, now that would be nice to see instead of these huge ranges...

Jason Haeger said...

You know, thinking about it, I don't see why that's not standard practice already.

Ben Chen said...

What does Agtron number tell you?

Jason Haeger said...

Degree of roast.

Ben Chen said...

And your definition of "degree of roast" is?

What I mean is, how is the information used? What does "degree of roast" really tell you?

Jason Haeger said...

It tells you more than you know before opening the bag. It's not always, but it can be an indicator of what to expect, especially if you're familiar with the coffees listed.

Ben Chen said...

I have found that, thru our roasting experiements thus far, that I can roast a bean multiple ways (vias profiling) and arrived at the same color. Yet the resulting roasts taste drastically differnt. In fact, most of my roasts looked very light but the taste is actually closer to "medium" roasts. I was also taught a trick of doing a dark(er) roast that taste like medium roast, though I have yet to explore that.

Every type of bean, depends on the processing and the origin, will have very different color than others. This is especially evident when you roast lighter.

The type of roaster and the heat source will also affect the resutling roast color. So a Daterra reserve roasted in a direct flame drum will be different than in a fluid bed air roaster even if the end roast color is the same.

To me, Agtron number is perhaps a good tool to check the consistncy of roasts (in a production setting) - that is, same bean roasted with the same profile. But even that has flaws as graduation from the bean surface to inner core is not captured in the number.



It's very dangerous (IMO) to use color/agtron number to judge a roast, let alone stopping a roast.

Just something to think about....