weight • volume • density

Knowing the density of your raw beans is key to adjust your roast profile. Knowing the density of roasted beans is important for successful blending. Keeping the bean density of a product constant helps to keep your customers happy.

From the batch weight and volume one can compute the density of the beans. That works for raw as well as roasted beans. A less known feature of Artisan, introduced in 2014, is the Volume Calculator, which computes the batch volume from the weight of a sample container of known volume filled to the rim with beans. Note that by density we refer to what is known as bulk density, which is different from the density of the bean material itself. However, bulk density gives a good estimation on the bean density.

The video below demonstrates how a scale can be used to measure and document the

• weight,
• volume and
• density

of raw and roasted beans. Further, the Wile 200 meter is use to measure also the raw and roasted beans moisture, which allows Artisan to compute also the organic loss of the batch, besides the weight loss, density loss and the volume gain.

Note that the Wile 200 is also measuring the density of the given beans using its build-in scale.  In the video below you can also spot that our home-brew (bulk-)density measurement results are quite close to those reported by the Wile200.

• green (bulk-)density: 753.6g/l (home-brew) vs 768g/l (Wile200)
• roasted (bulk-)density: 437.1g/l (home-brew) vs 463g/l (Wile200)

The video features also a direct Bluetooth connection between Artisan and the Pearl (sponsored item by Acaia) and Lunar scales from Acaia, to be released this summer.

Those Acaia scales have a maximum weight of 2kg. To use them with larger roasters I added the possibility to weight batches in parts, each smaller than 2kg. And for those like myself, that always forget to tare the scale with their empty container, I added a mechanism that subtracts the tare weights of "known" containers automatically.

Enjoy!