Roast profile analysis

4 Comments/in Calculations, Coffee science, Coffee science explained, Roasting Professional, SCAE, SCAE
CDS/by Morten Mnchow
This blog post is sketching out the basics of a roast profile analysis and introduces the concepts
and basic calculations that are part of the exam for the Roasting professional in the SCAE Coffee
Diploma System.

A roast profile is a graphs that shows the temperature development during a roast cycle and
preferably both bean and air temp is measured and logged. An idealized profile is illustrated
here:

During a roast you have different events, and the next illustration plots in these events:
As you can see when the green coffee at room temp is added to a preheated roasters the
temperature drops quickly but after some time you would get a turning point where the
temperature starts rising rather than falling. After the turning point you have a period of the roast
with maximum temperature increment speed and the speed of the roast is in the business often
called Rate of Rise (RoR) and the maximum rate of rise is a good thing to log and will be
explained in detail later in this post. After a while you get 1st crack and the last event is when the
roast ends and the development time is time from 1st crack to end of the roast.

The temperature difference between air and bean is an interesting measure since it gives in
indication how much convection drives the roast at any part of the roast process. I recommend to
calculate the temperature difference at the turning point, at 1st crack and at end as shown on this
below illustration:
Other interesting readings from the graph is the rate of rise as shown below:
The rate of rise is the speed of the roast (degrees pr minute) at any given time at the roast. 3
relevant points at the roast is defined above namely the max RoR, RoR at 1st crack and RoR
when the roast finishes.

If you understand everything so far, there is no need to read further, but at the exam for the
Roasting Professional Certification calculations are important since it is part of the certification
process.

Geometrically a rate is the slope of a tangent at a given point on a curve:

A tangent only touch the curve in one point and it is exactly in this point that the tangent says
something interesting about the slope namely how quickly the curve changes in this point. So
the tangent represents the speed of the curve in this particular point so we would like to calculate
the inclination of the tangent because the inclination of the tangent equals the inclination of the
curve in the particular point. So for a roast profile the tangent at any given point exposes the
speed of the roast at this given point.

So measure the slope of a tangent you can just choose a random range of the tangent like in this
example:
On the above illustration we have C on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal axis just like
on a roast profile. Just as an example the slopes is calculated based on how much the speed of
temperature rise is in 3 min, and as you can se the specific tangent will rise 42C during 3
minutes which will give you 14 degrees per minute which is the Rate of Rise of the curve (the
circle in this example) in exactly the point where the tangent touch the curve.

If we choose to calculate the RoR at another point of the curve I could be a little later in the
process like this:
Here you can see, that the slope of the curve is different and the inclination of the tangent in the
point is less steep. Here the time period is chosen to be 4 minutes and during the 4 minutes the
temperature rises with 22C giving a Rate of Rise of 22C / 4 minutes = 5,5 pr minute. I prefer
to always look at the inclination of the tangent in a 4 minutes period because I find it easy to
divide the corresponding temperature range by 4 in my head.

But let us look at an example that is relevant to the RoR of a roast profile:
As with the other tangents we would like to know how many C the temperature changes during
the 4 minutes of the tangent that represents the inclination of the curve in the one point where the
tangent touch the curve. The challenge here is that the tangent is completely horizontal so there
is not change in temperature which means that the temperature difference is = 0! So if we divide
0 with 4 we still have 0. So the RoR of the curve in the point where the tangent touch the curve is
0. In other words: the temperature is not going up anymore so the speed of the roast has stalled
which is announced by the RoR by taking on the value of 0.

There is one last state of the RoR worth a mention and that is when the slope of the tangent is
negative:
When the curve starts to go down after having stalled the RoR becomes negative because when
you consider a change you always calculates the change by subtracting the initial state from the
resulting state and if the process has gone in the reverse direction you subtract a bigger number
from a smaller number and the result is negative (see the blogpost about change for a deeper
explanation) so here it is -22C/4min = -5,5C/min. A negative RoR is something you dont want
in your roast profile in general yet for the last few seconds in the roast some coffees would work
with a very low RoR, a stalling RoR (=0) and only few profiles would you ever find with a
negative RoR in the end of the roast!

So to conclude this post the following is an illustration of all the main points of a roast profile: