Professor Abbott's Virtual Coffee Roaster

BH Unlimited Update, Jan. 4th 2023

What do you get if you ask too many questions? In our case, we got an early Christmas gift — a new app to simulate coffee roasting, created by multidisciplinary scientist Professor Steven Abbott.

Regular readers will know that we frequently lean on Professor Abbott to help us with coffee's thorniest problems. Coffee roasting, as we're discovering writing our Roasting Science course, raises a ton of questions that we have no good answers for. For example: What is the role of moisture in the 'crash and flick' that can happen around the first crack? And are exothermic reactions really significant in coffee roasting?

When we put these questions to Professor Abbott, he immediately ran into a problem: We are missing some of the most important data. We look at the outcome (the temperature of the beans and exhaust gases), but don't measure the inputs (the temperature of the drum and incoming air). It's a bit like baking a cake, but trying to work out the correct oven temperature by looking at how brown the cake gets.

To help answer this and many other questions, and fill in those data gaps, Professor Abbott built a roasting sim. The idea is that by simulating roasting, and then seeing how real beans behave differently from the simulator, we can start to work out what the effects of moisture or exothermic reactions might be.

For now, the app is an interesting way to model how changing settings in your roaster might change the outcome of your roast. The real potential, though, will come by gathering more data to feed the simulation. The best way to do this, according to Professor Abbott, may not be by roasting coffee at all, but by 'roasting' some kind of fake beans and seeing how they behave.

To do this, we're looking for help from the roasting community — Professor Abbott himself explains it better than we can. You can read it all in his blog post and video here.

As always, we're just an email away if you have any queries! Have a great week and we look forward to seeing you next time.

To the Boundaries of Coffee,
Team BH