Profile Drum Roasting: The roast profile for my evaluation was 10:40/12:40/17:35 @ 260 F. The EOR is in a nice zone, not too high, not too low. You can take it a little higher than some, taking into account the bold Amelonado chocolate character, if you want to really bring out the dried sweet fruit notes. Feel free to take the kid gloves off here. This bean benefits from a strong firm hand. There is so much depth of flavor here that you can and should roast fast. I’ve found slower roasts fail to develop the flavor and you end up with astringency that otherwise would not be there.
You can certainly roast this to a lower temperature, but you want to keep the finishing phase around 5 minutes for full, deep heat penetration and astringency mitigation.
Behmor: P1 for 18-19 minutes with 2 lb will be just fine. Go by the aroma. When it turns sharper near the end of the countdown, you are done. If it isn’t there yet, add a bit more time, waiting for the turn of aroma. Due to the cold start of the Behmor, you can just set it on the 1 lb setting with 2.5 lb of cocoa and go. When you begin getting aromatic notes, somewhere around 4 minutes left (14 minutes elapsed of the 18 minute start), drop the power to P4 (75% power) and continue roasting for about another 6-8 minutes, waiting for the aroma to either decrease or get sharp. This is all, of course, if you don’t have a thermocouple in the beans (Modifying your Behmor). If you have that, you can follow the profiles above.
Oven Roasting: You will need an IR thermometer. Roast 2 lb of beans. Preheat your oven to 325 F. Place your cocoa beans in a single layer on a baking sheet and into the oven. Stir the beans at 5 minutes and check the temperature. Continue roasting until the surface temperature reads 205-215 F (it may well vary across the beans). At that point, turn your oven down 10-15 F above your target EOR; in this case, 260 + ~15 = 275, and continue to roast, stirring every 5 minutes until approximately 260 F. Again, there will be variation, but the beauty of this method is that, having turned the oven down, it is difficult to overroast. The important part here is to get good momentum going in a hot oven and then basically coast to finish. You may not get much chocolate or brownie aroma with this one.