A Camel, Kenneth Davids and 22 + hours of driving

Holy Cow! Or should I say Holy Camel!

I'm always amazed at what life brings and how much there is to live for.

It started off last Sunday when it was such a beautiful day. The weather was a perfect temperature for a motorcycle ride. I, like most Americans love the freedom of the road and traveling. Driving a motorcycle is my next best thing to flying an airplane due to the openness of how your environment surrounds you. It is a great way to free my mind and to start the week refreshed.

So where did the Camel come into play? I was cruising down SR 135 toward Nashville, Indiana when I had to do a double take. What! A Camel. Was I hallucinating from the exhaust fumes of the car in front of me? There was a tall Camel amongst a pack of Llamas. Ok. Llamas are different and a rarity, but a Camel? It's not like I was cruising the highways of Kuwait. Off to the left there was an animal hospital that was out in farm land, another oddity. So that's where it all started. Just Amazing.

As the week progressed... Wednesday I was doing a follow up call to Praxis International. I still call the company Praxis Werke for that German name (Werke) still sticks with me all these years. I have been investigating their Logfile control software for our next planned roaster project.

Joachim Eichner (chief Engineer at Praxis) has developed this system to control larger roasters for companies like Green Mountain Coffee. This software does more than just roasting coffee. It has functions for history notes, traceabilty and few more functions I'm looking for. He recently has been developing the Artsan Logofile software for smaller coffee roasters like us. It is meant to keep the craftsmanship (the artisan) for roastmasters by having more control in how the development of the roasting of the coffee and yet maintaining repeatability and consistency.

As we talked he asked if I couldn't come there Friday with such short notice. He invited me to be part of the evaluation team they were doing with Kenneth Davids (know to all in our industry for the Coffee Review and being a Master Coffee Cupping Extraodinaire). He was going to be doing a cupping session on coffees roasted using the Artisan Logofile. There is much debate on profile roasting coffees, and Ken is going to put his taste buds to the test. I said wait a minute... I started clicking my mouse on my computer to scan my electronic brain for what meetings or appointments I had for the rest of the week. Move this, reschedule that and make a hotel reservation. Presto! Now the eleven plus hour drive to East Hanover, New Jersey.

On Friday I arrive at Praxis at 8:30am and I'm greeted by Rolfe Blogett. He's a bit tired from pulling an all-nighter doing some PLC programming on another customers project. Joachim soon arrives and we were back out the door to pickup Kenneth Davids and Todd Curtis (Green Mountain Coffee Roasters). At 9:30 we start warming up the 5 Kilo Samiac coffee roaster. There were a couple other prototype coffee roasters there as well. Joachim and his fabrication crew show us some projects and capabilities his company are able to perform.

Josh (Vishwa Adluri) stopped by and introduced himself - He and Henry Schwartzberg just had the article "Heat Wave" published in the March/April edition of Roast Magazine. Then he was off to cook us a fantastic meal for the evening. I thought we were actually going out for a meal that night to his family's restaurant. Somewhere I missed what someone told me. No surprise there, since I was really focused on the roasting and watching the Artisan Program.

We did a few batches of Papua New Guinea coffee to warm up the roaster and make sure the calibrations were in specifications. We brewed it up, very tasty. Ken had decided he wanted us to roast and cup the Kenya coffee. We started the process by starting with a "Learn Roast". This is where you manually roast the coffee and the Artisan program learns the parameters you used. On the second roast, we then ran the "Learned Roast Profile". The system worked as advertised. The program ran following the roast profile curve. This meant that it followed the bean temperature and controlled the environmental temperatures to achieve an exact duplicate of the first "Learned Roast". We did evaluate the roast levels of the learned roast and the profiled roast on an Agtron Spectrometer. The Agtron unit uses the infrared light spectrum to compare roast levels. The wholebean and ground samples matched exactly. So far, so good. Impressive.

On our next roast we did a learn roast and roasted the coffee to a different roast curve. This type of curve was called a "J-Curve". These different types of curves are done to achieve different roast taste characteristics, such as body or brightness. Unfortunately we had a problem. The Artisan program was following the curve, but it was delayed in time. Come to find out after troubleshooting with a few more coffee batches we had an exhaust fan issue. Due to using more of the Kenyan to troubleshoot, we came to a point where we were not going to be able to due three different roast comparisons. We shot ourselves in the foot on that one. We opted to call it a night to attend Josh's' home cooked meal and that Ken had to fly out at 4am the next day. So in the end we didn't get to cup coffees with Ken. Bummer!

I too had to leave the next day, but I opted to try and work on the roaster to see if we were going to be able do a cupping comparison. We attempted to do a few batches of Panama Boquete, but the exhaust fan issue still plagued us. So 1pm came and I had to get on the road. Another eleven hour drive ahead of me.

I arrived home just a little after midnight. What a week. A Camel, Kenneth Davids and 1450 miles later... Whew! I'm ready for another vacation.

Mary, is it in the budget?