Finca El Paraíso — Santa Barbara, Honduras
Producer: Wil Edilberto Armijo
Variety: Pacas (Bourbon mutation)
Altitude: 1550 m

This roast was intended as a personal roast for drinking, but also provided another opportunity to observe how the Gene Café behaves when using TRT as a guardrail.

The roast followed a very typical progression for the machine early on. Drying reached 200 °C at around 4:22, with colour moving from green through yellow and into the expected peanut stage smoothly. The Maillard phase developed steadily, with the beans taking on a rich brown colour earlier than expected.

First crack was marked at approximately 12:08, although during the roast I was not fully confident in what I was hearing. The Gene Café drum noise and airflow can make crack detection difficult, and visually the beans already appeared darker than expected for this stage. Because of that uncertainty, I chose to follow the planned TRT guardrail and cooled at 13:01.

The resulting roast finished with 13.6 % weight loss (250 g → 215.9 g), placing it firmly in the light roast range. In hindsight, the late crack timing compressed development slightly, leaving only about 53 seconds of development before cooling.

This roast should produce a bright, elegant cup with lively acidity and lighter body. Given the producer’s notes of blueberry, hibiscus, and red grape, it will be interesting to see how much of that fruit character comes through at this lighter development.

One useful observation from this roast is how easily colour can mislead during roasting. The beans appeared darker in the drum than the final weight loss suggests. This reinforces the value of using multiple signals during roasting — colour, aroma, crack timing, and TRT — rather than relying on any single indicator.

For brewing, this roast will likely perform best in filter methods that highlight clarity, such as a V60, although it will also be interesting to compare against a fuller-bodied brew like the Hoop.

As with many roasts in this project, the most valuable outcome is not the cup alone, but the continued understanding of how the machine and the coffee interact — one roast at a time.