Thanks for watching. Wish I could leave this up, but we’ve been censored.

Instead, you can watch Deaton roasting Rwanda in LA:

Seriously, though… doesn’t “approachable” somehow imply that our other coffees are unapproachable, or at least stand-off-ish?

Check out Charlie Habegger‘s flattering report on a cupping we tried to sabotage a few months ago with some folks from our Broadway Cafe.

A few weeks ago, right about when the dead of winter was setting in here in Chicago and H1N1 was still roaming the earth, a guy by the name of Chris showed up at our humble facilities on Fulton Street to give us a demo of his Dry Ice Blaster from Cold Jet.

Every Friday is cleaning day down here. Before we crack open a bag of green coffee to roast, we drown ourselves in coffee soot, scrubbing and scraping the trays, tubes, elbows, joints, chaff cans, pipes, stacks, drums, and fans that accumulate oils and debris from a week’s worth of roasting. Here’s a few examples of our manual cleaning endeavors:

“Elbow Friday”

Inside the 90k Blue Exhaust Fan – Before Cleaning

Inside the 90k Blue Exhaust Fan – After Cleaning

Inside an Elbow Joint – Before Cleaning

Inside an Elbow Joint – After Cleaning

Inside the 90k Red Airflow Dampener – Before Cleaning

Inside the 90k Red Airflow Dampener – After Cleaning

Of course, when we heard about the possibility of blasting away all that junk with a dry ice gun, we couldn’t pass up the chance to see it in action. Here’s a few videos of the event (caution – you might need earplugs).

This is Chris from Cold Jet loading the dry ice, and Jason on the blaster.

In this one you can see Josh using the blaster. That’s Bob Quinlan chatting it up with Chris in the background, and Drew Cattlin from Ecco poking his head in there. The estimable Jesse Crouse makes an appearance after about 2 minutes in his trademark red beanie.

Been a while since our last bloggage, and a lot has happened. Don’t know if we’ll keep this thing going regularly or not, but we’ve got a lil graph for the geeks out there. Credit: Jason Lips for both the roasts & the graph design/compilation.

This is a chart of multiple roasts of a particular Brazil – 60kg per batch in our 90k capacity Gothots. We’ve been using the RT Roast Illuminator roast graphing software by Ambex for one of our machines in Chicago… hoping to get the other two (plus the one in LA) up and running on the software soon. It’s been really useful in determining where in the roast coffee is being most affected by heat adjustments, and keeps us more consistent and attentive to changes. In tandem with cupping data, it’s becoming a powerful tool that has helped us hone in on specific flavor profiles and different techniques to improve our results.