The first three roasts on a new machine

The most common mistake on a new roaster is loading it with an expensive bean on day one. The machine is unfamiliar, the coffee is gone, and you blame the coffee.

Here is the sequence we suggest for the first week. It is a procedure, not a recipe — every drum responds differently to the burner and the damper, and you have to find your own curve.

1. Dry run

• Light the burner at 60–70%
• Bring the drum to 200 °C and hold for 20 minutes
• This heats the drum and insulation through and burns off protective oil

Expect smoke and smell the first time. Full extraction. No beans.

2. Three throwaway batches

Use cheap or defective beans. Run three batches with identical burner, damper and charge weight.

Why three: the first batch is still absorbing heat into the metal, so the data is not representative. The second stabilises. The third is the machine's real response.

Record four things per batch:

1. Charge temperature
2. Turning point — the low point and how long it took to get there
3. Time to first crack
4. Duration of first crack

Write it down, or log it in Artisan (optional).

3. Starting parameters

Drop point: 30–60 seconds past the end of first crack for a light roast; 1:00–1:30 past for medium; into second crack (~225 °C) for dark.

4. Cooling

Start the cooling tray and extraction immediately. Target room temperature inside five minutes. Slow cooling keeps the bean "roasting" and flattens the flavour. A tray loaded beyond its rating cools slowly — one more reason not to run a big drum with a small batch.

5. When to start adjusting

After three batches you should know how long charge-to-first-crack takes on this machine, how fast the burner responds, and how much batch one differs from batch three. If batches one and three differ a lot, the preheat was not long enough.

Then tune the burner profile and airflow. Stability first, optimisation second.