Scott Rao's Roaster Companion - Opinions?

[soliloquy]

I read it. My opinion of the book may be a bit skewed as I'd never yet roasted a bean in my life. After finishing the book I certainly still had a lot of questions. That is to say, Roa's book did not answer all my noob questions about roasting. The three commandments for example: he tells you this is what your profile curve should look like, but doesn't tell you how to manipulate the roaster to get those results. Nevertheless, now that I am roasting, I find myself going back to the book as a reference. It's a great book for roasters. I just wish it went into more details in some areas, such as manipulating the gas on the roaster (how much and when).

 

[peterjschmidt]

I haven't read the book, but no doubt there are too many different roasters, and they all respond to input differently. It'll be up to you to learn how to manipulate yours to see if you can achieve Rao's suggested profile, and then to see if you think it's the best profile for you or if you want to try new things. No book can give you all the answers, but I hope you enjoy the process of becoming the best roaster you can be.

 

[HillofBeans]

I enjoyed the book. And have been recommending it to coworkers who want to learn more about roasting. The commandment about a constantly falling rate of rise is something that 90% of our profiles reflected before the book came out. And I'm not ashamed to admit that after reading the book and we did a quick review of the profiles and found that re-working those last 10% made those coffees taste better.
We have also, thanks to Cropster, started thinking about the time from 1st crack to finish as % of the roast instead of purely in number of seconds. I have not, however, found the time frame of 20%-25% to be where we most enjoy all of our coffees. We have a few that never taste better to us than when that number is closer to 17% As he and many others will note the beginning of 1st can be quite up for debate even among two roasters at the same machine.
Overall, impressed by the book and it made us a better team of roasters.

I found that my profiles also all seem to have the constantly falling RoR but after First Crack to end is not always at the 20%-25% and actually many of my profiles have the RoR increase between end of First Crack and the end of the roast (between (410*F and dump at around 428*F or higher) at this last minutes of roast my RoR will go from around 10*F per minute to maybe 15*F- I always did it that way - actually kinda hard to change and not stall on my machine.

My thing about the commandments is 1) that a lot of respected roasters contradict them -Booth for one and 2) it would be hard to follow all of them and still have individual profiles for different coffees
I tweak a lot but to tell you the truth i wouldn't mind a consensus on some commandments to simplify things
So Thanks for the responses!