What is baked coffee?

Baked is a roast defect that produces coffee that's dull, flat, and somehow both roasted and uninteresting at the same time. It happens when the roast loses momentum - the rate of rise crashes or plateaus for too long - leaving the beans stuck at a temperature that's too low for meaningful development reactions but high enough to slowly drive off aromatic volatiles without replacing them.

The result in the cup is hollow: some colour, some roasted character, but no sweetness, muted acidity, and a flatness that can be hard to put your finger on. It's subtle enough to seem like a mediocre coffee rather than an obvious fault, which makes baked harder to diagnose than something like scorched or underdeveloped.

The cause is almost always a roasting decision - too little heat at a critical stage, gas dropped too aggressively after first crack, or a temperature crash that wasn't caught and corrected. Monitoring RoR continuously through the roast is the most reliable way to catch it before it ruins the batch.