The green
Sack tag · Nyamasheke, Rwanda
- Producer
- Gitwe hill station, 620 members, drying on 40 raised beds
- Altitude
- 1,680–1,790 m
- Variety
- Red Bourbon
- Process
- natural
- Harvest
- Picked March to May, landed 9 August
- In the store
- Five sacks of 60 kg, all but one left — this is the new arrival
On the table
strawberry · cocoa nib · black tea
Naturals carry their own sugar into the drum and will scorch if you let the drum run hot at the wall, so this one gets a slower ramp and more air from the turning point on. Landed a fortnight ago and still tightening up; the fruit is louder now than it will be in a month, which is the argument for buying it this week.
The curve
Rung 2 of 4 · dropped at 204 °C
- Charge
- 195 °C
- drum, at the moment the green goes in
- Turning point
- 1:42 at 94 °C
- where the bean stops cooling and starts heating
- First crack
- 8:36
- the seed splits along its centre crease
- Drop
- 10:22
- hatch open at 204 °C, four minutes to cool
- Development
- 1:46 · 17.0 %
- crack to drop, and its share of the roast
- Weight loss
- 15.4 %
- green to roasted, water and chaff
Every batch of this lot is roasted to that shape and written down afterwards, whether it landed or not. The last eight sheets are in the roast log.
How we brewed it
Dialled on the bench, three days off the roast
Filter
60 g/L, 93 °C, 2:50 total, ground medium-coarse
Rinsed paper, bloom with twice the coffee weight for forty seconds, then two even pours. If it tastes thin, grind finer before you touch the temperature — that is the change with the shortest odds.
Espresso
18 g in, 46 g out, 27 s, 92 °C
Aim for that window and adjust the grind, not the dose. Under-extracted tastes sharp and empty; over-extracted goes dry and hollow at the finish. The middle of the two is where this lot lives.
Both recipes assume filtered water at roughly 80 ppm hardness and a brewer at room temperature. Cafés on the wholesale list get these dialled in on their own machine, with their own water, before the first delivery.