How to Roast Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Grade 2: NCT Filter E Recipe
Dialing in Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Grade 2 — 14 logged home roasts with real metrics
Ethiopia · Yirgacheffe · Washed · 1,700-2,200 MASL · G2 · John Burton
Aroma of dried red fruits, citrus and vanilla biscuit. Flavours of toasted tea, lemon zest, caramel, spiced cookies and floral notes. Roasted nuts and caramel aftertaste. Low acidity and medium body. Score: 82.5+
“This is not bad, it's smooth, it's nice, it's a little bit fruity… better than the 91 roast.”
Winning batch R-090 · 2026-07-09
Cup quality across 14 attempts
Each point is a roast scored from tasting notes (1 = miss, 5 = dialed in). The series stops at the teal halo — once dialed in, later repeats aren’t scored the same way.
Where the good cups live
Roast level vs batch size. Color = profile family; larger dots = better cups. Notice how quality clusters once batch size moves to 100–120g.
Roast mechanics that stuck
DTR, roast loss, and rate-of-rise across attempts with klog data. Each series is scaled on its own axis so shapes are comparable.
What the data taught us
- 160g F-WSH loads stayed green — thermal mass mattered as much as level.
- 2Cranking F-WSH / NordicLight darker (3.0–3.3) did not fix underdevelopment; it often stayed grassy or went bland.
- 3NCT Filter E at ~2.4 / 100g first delivered smooth fruit without green (R-090) — better than Filter B/D at similar levels.
- 4Still a work in progress: fruit is there but bloom still a touch dark; R-096 at 2.2 is the lighter fine-tune.
Want to log a journey like this?
Track profiles, klog metrics, and tasting notes until the cup clicks.