How to Create the Perfect Background Curve

A background curve can act like a set of rails to ride while roasting. Roast masters often use a successful past roast as a reference in the background to follow and reproduce. This can be very helpful. Frequently the roasts available to use as a reference suffer from imperfections like RoR curves that show dips, crashes and flicks. A question we are asked is how to use an existing curve to create a "perfect" reference curve, a curve with straight line declining RoR using the event times and temperatures from an existing curve. This article will show one method to create a such a reference background curve.

Artisan v2.4

We are proud to present the results of our work of the past months. This release takes Artisan quite a bit further by introducing a number of new roasting tools besides and many small refinements. Enjoy the new Roast Comparator, Roast Simulator, and Profile Transposer now available with Artisan v2.4!

Working Together – Artisan, ArtisanViewer and artisan.plus

The Artisan family of applications and services can work together to enhance the roast master's productivity.  This article will describe the many ways these applications communicate with each other and how you can use them to increase your productivity.

Special Events Annotations

A common question asked when analyzing a completed roast profile is "what was the time and bean temperature when that gas change was made?"  To help answer this and similar questions, Artisan v2.4 introduces customizable, data driven special event annotations.  Special event annotations add detailed information in text format to the special event lines.  These annotations speed interpretation of a profile in post roast analysis by writing out the pertinent information directly on the graph. The user has broad flexibility when defining the text and data to be displayed.  This allows bespoke annotations that meet the user's individual needs.

Autosave File Naming

Artisan v2.4 introduces a powerful new capability to create custom data driven file names.

Artisan has always had the ability to automatically save a profile to disk at the end of a roast, or on a keystroke during the roast.  This is handy to prevent losing a profile due to forgetfulness or other accidents.  The file name auto-generated for saving included the roast title or a text string and the date for identification but was otherwise not very descriptive. 

Roast Simulator

The Roast Simulator allows to replay a previously recorded roast session. It allows to play with events, alarms, and other settings without wasting coffee.

Profile Transposer

The temperatures recorded and logged in profiles during roasts depend on the exact probe placement among other things like airflow. This makes it hard to compare profiles recorded on different machines. Luckily there are some points in a roast that can be identified based on physical changes of the beans during a roast, like the yellow point (DRY) and the start of first-crack (FCs). The recorded temperatures at those points can be compared and used to construct a mapping from profiles recorded on one machine to those on another machine. The profile transposer is a tool that supports the construction and application of such mappings along the temperature axis, but also along the time axis to extend or compress a profile.