Roasts 32 and 33 were designed as a controlled comparison on the Gene Café CBR-301.

Cold start versus warm start.
Same Brazil Santos coffee. Same 250g batch size. Same 250°C set temperature. Same airflow pattern.
The only meaningful variable was machine starting temperature.

On paper, that felt minor.

In practice, it wasn’t.

Roast 32 began at room temperature (~21°C).
200°C was reached in the mid-4 minute range.
A 13:20 Total Roast Time (TRT) landed cleanly at ~16% weight loss.

Roast 33 began with the Gene Café CBR-301 already warm (~60°C retained heat after cooling cycle).
200°C arrived before 3 minutes.
Even with a shorter TRT, weight loss jumped to ~18%.

The difference was not subtle.

What changed wasn’t the ending.
It was the beginning.

The early ramp — specifically the time to 200°C — quietly determined the rest of the roast. By the time TRT was shortened, the additional early energy had already accumulated. The system had momentum.

This clarified something important about roasting on the Gene Café CBR-301:

Total Roast Time is not absolute.
It is contextual.

13:05 means something very different when 200°C arrives at 4:30
than when it arrives at 2:57.

The Gene Café retains thermal memory.
And that retained heat materially shifts phase behaviour.

The lesson is not that warm starts are wrong.
It’s that warm starts must be treated as a new baseline.

Subtracting a few seconds from TRT is not enough.
Phase timing must guide the adjustment.

For practical use on the Gene Café CBR-301:

• Watch time to 200°C.
• Adjust TRT meaningfully, not symbolically.
• Confirm development with weight loss.
• Treat machine start temperature as a real variable.

What initially felt like a minor operational detail turned out to be a defining system behaviour.

The Gene Café CBR-301 is consistent.

But consistency depends on respecting the system state, not just the temperature setting.

---