My First Roast Complete!!

[jgbutler]

Brewed my last press of Medellin Mad-Man this morning to start my morning, and decided I had better attempt my first roast so I would have something to brew in the morning. Well my first attempt at roasting is finished and I think things went very well.

I have an order coming from SM but it hasn't made it yet. I was going to start out with a Columbian for my first attempt. Thanks to a fine brother and a group buy though, I had a nice big bag of Turquino beans to get started with. Probably not the beans you would want to make your first attempt with, but they were all I had.

So here's how things went. Let me know how this sounds to ya'll. Also from you guys that have roasted these beans before, what is the best degree of roast for these beans? That is if you are using a press for your brewing.

First off I don't have any scales yet, so according to SM about 4oz or 2/3 to 3/4 cup of beans is about the limit for a Poppery II. I went with just a hair under 2/3 cup of beans. Got the Poppery II fired up and started the timer. It reached first crack right at 3 1/2 minutes. Here's where things kind of started to confuse me a little. From what I've read and heard from some of you guys, with an air popper, sometimes it can go from first to second crack rather quickly.

During my roast, first crack was very distinguishable with constant cracking noise. After that though the constant cracking noise subsided but there were continual cracking noises that could be heard every few seconds from that point on. I wasn't for sure how pronounced second crack would be, and wasn't for sure if that was what I ws hearing or not. I was basically just watching the color of the beans as my guide.

What I am saying was second crack occured 6 1/2 minutes into the roast. It was another very distinguishable rapid sound of cracking noise. I went about 5 to 10 seconds into what I was calling second crack, before shutting down the Poppery II. I poured the beans into a collander pretty quickly and I could see just a few specks of oil starting to appear on some of the beans, but for the most part, the beans didn't have much oils showing on them. The color looked to me to be what I would call just about perfect.

They are now resting in a mason jar with a loose lid. I roasted these at noon and planned on sealing the jar up tight before bedtime tonight. I will try a brew of these in the morning and see how I did. So what do you guys think? Does this sound about right to you or do you see anywhere I might have screwed up?