Coffee Roasting

First off, I have modified my roast profile on the Gene, following a recommendation from
BoldJava on HomeBarista.com:

<Quote>You are working too hard with it. Preheat to 474 thermostat setting for a washed bean
(5* lower for . E-Stop. Add beans.

Re-start. First crack should occur between 8 and 9 minutes. Run 2 min for a washed after FC;
1:40 for a natural.
Drop and cool externally.</Quote>

With my machine and environment, first crack occurs between 12:00 and 12:30 minutes. The
first crack is detected from the Artisan ROR plot of the Environmental Temperature probe. I am
hearing impared, have never been able to hear first crack, and being able to see it is wonderful.
I am attaching the Artisan plot of today's roast for reference. See what you think!

The air exhaust temperature monitoring IN REAL TIME is a very good mean to anticipate the
FC, maybe the best.
Yeah, the Gene display is averaged for at least one minute window... too slow for this purpose.
The rise you see in the attached graph, the orange curve, happens always for any roasting
method with constant airflow.
For my setup it is about 15 seconds before the audible cracks.

Monitoring glass temperature for Gene don't give you a relevant info, too much thermal inertia.
Same for beans measurement using IR, because passing of radiation through glass, and also
beans surface irregularities.

As you can see from the graph, that moment happens fast, so a measurement per second
would be recommended, which is faster than reading on a meter and typing value in excel. And
also watch beans color, to decide drop time...
There was a roasting software called RoastLogger, able to "read" values on a meter display
using a camera and OCR recognition, the freeware edition should be available for download
somewhere.
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