Coffee Data Science
How Roasted Beans Cool
Side-quest with a thermal camera
I have been roasting on the Roest for the past year, and the cooling tray has done so well at cooling the coffee to room temperature within about two minutes. I figured I might as well measure how quickly the temperature drops using a thermal camera (FLIR to be specific).
I held it mostly steady, and the main challenge is that the thermal camera could not image above 150 C. Additionally, I was only measuring the temperature on the outside at the top so there may have been some variance.
The cooling fan pulls air from the bottom, so the top should be the hottest.
Here are images at once per second.
I downsampled this collage to make it bit easier to see.
Then I plotted the samples of temperature compared to time, and this shows the temperature drops very quickly and predictably. The temperature drops below 100 C in less than 30 seconds.
The cooling tray doesn’t have a control, so there is not much to do aside from observing the variable. Some data with vacuum freezing shows faster cooling is better. I wonder if putting some cooling element on top would be interesting.
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Further readings of mine:
My Second Book: Advanced Espresso
My First Book: Engineering Better Espresso
