In roasting I tend to go by one rule, you can’t add anything to the coffee you can only highlight or destroy. We’re not making coffee, we’re editing coffee. We’re taking a piece of work in its raw form and shaping it so that its intended audience will get as stoked as possible about it.

Roasting for vibrancy in green buying is important because if you don’t know the potential of a coffee you don’t really know it and so won’t know what you can do with it. They’re ain’t no strawberry acidity button on any roaster but there is ways to kill that acidity or put a spotlight on it. Manipulating a coffees character is turning its dials up and down, more acidity or less, more sweetness or less and this is at the heart of profiling. But before we look at dials though we need to look at something more fundamental, shapes.

A profile shape is the shape of all the probe data as displayed on your roast tracking software. Most of us who roast on a drum roaster have ideas of what your own ideal bean probe s-curve profile shape is, it might be fast in the beginning, slow in the end, whatever floats your boat. We are all though just tweaking the same s-curve shape because the s- curve shape is dictated by the machine its self. Put cool coffee in a hot drum and that is the shape you get. This means it’s likely we don’t know what shape is the best for coffee, it’s just the one we got because of the equipment we use.

Using the IKAWA though we can actually create new shapes instead of just being limited to the s-curve. In creating the BOP profiles I cupped through dozens and dozens of different shapes, just looking to see what on the cupping table made the coffee’s flavours explode. In the end I was left with something like an s-curve but looking more like an up-side down hockey stick.

The sweetness of a given coffee, especially those in the high 80’s can be manipulated by changing its characteristic. Coffees in the high 80’s tend to have sweetness rooted in fruit flavours or a refined sugar character. This kind of sweetness can be either preserved in its fruit character or it can be roasted to make seem more like a darker sugar. You cannot do this with lower scoring coffee so when roasting to buy you should look capture the most fruit driven coffee possible.

The best way to do this is in the development of the coffee. Taking the shape here we want to extend development time as long as possible before the refined or fruit sweetness begins to break down.

Best of Panama is some of the most remarkable coffees in the world. Tasting them is among the most powerful sensory experiences you can have in coffee. How we approach the BOP auction cupping is how we should approach tasting every coffee for the first time. By giving the coffee the best possible chance to show us what makes it special.

The roast profiles are included in each Auction Lot Sample Set, but even if you’re not planning to bid, you might find these profiles useful to explore – especially with Josh’s insights in mind.