First Two Roasts

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[hankua]

I'm guessing the Nicaragua is around the full city range and going to be good.

If you open up roast properties and fill in some of the boxes, it will print on the bottom. Charge weight and roasted weight is a good on to track which will auto calculate weight loss %. I put Huky or Huky500 in the big box.

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[edtbjon]

Those roasts looks very very good for "beginner" attempts. My first question is if you make use of the grate and when you do it. (I tried to standardize on shutting the grate at 190C/375F and used a renamed "damper" marking in Artisan to denote that 0 to 1 change...)
As you've obviously read my and Hanks advice on charging low (Hank inspired me on this subject when I was new to the Huky...), the dry times arn't that bad. You can give the roaster quite a bit of "umph" from the beginning with this approach and I'm happy to see some profiles with the perforated drum (so that I don't have to rebuild my machine again... . Also, you can charge even lower and "accept" drying times at 6'ish minutes. From there you can go into the mid "Maillard" phase with even more energy. (I aim at 26-30F/min at DE having the RoR going down the slant to say 15-20F/min, depending on what I have in mind for that particular roast.)
That jump in the BT and RoR you had in the second roast is quite typical at that part of the roast. (Which is why I above asked about the grate...) Just make a note to yourself to lower the heat at 370F if closing the grate isn't enough... Btw, in your graph you can actually see in the DeltaET when that jump really took place.

[edtbjon]

... I haven't been able to understand exactly what "charge low" means ...

The thread (which I started) on "Charging low..." (Don't remember the title at the moment) is quite recent and easy to look up. The whole idea with charging lower than the "community consensus" is to instead of charging at say 220C/430F making the turning point (TP) fall at 100C/212F, I charge at 180C/355F and my TP will fall at say 80C/175F. (This made up example is at least close to the numbers I used on my perf. setup for 12-16 oz charges.) Now, why? Well, instead of just having to push the brakes and constantly reduce the heat, I could push the gas pedal quite a bit, pushing more energy into most part of the roast. Apart from making the roaster easier to control, making it easier to both replicate and tweak the different part of the roasts, I find that the roasts are getting better developed. Last but not least, the coffee tastes better. I hope that this makes sense...

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[thusband]

Yeah, give it three or four more days and try 'em again.  I've had beans that were just OK with three days rest but after 10 days they were delicious.