Tradition vs. Technology
Setting roasting standards in a growing market
by Phillip Beattie
photos by Nicole Maas

So much has been said about how young the specialty coffee scene is. Sometimes I feel we are at a disadvantage for not having ancient, long-standing traditions.

Of course, there are amazing coffee rituals practiced to this day in the gorgeous coffee lands of Ethiopia. And in the stories of self-sustaining villages and hamlets, you often hear of the pillars of the community—the butcher, the baker, the blacksmith, the doctor—serving traditional roles, passing their ancient customs and expertise onto the next generation. But it seems such a traditional role is lacking for the coffee craftsperson.

The traditions and techniques of modern-day coffee roasting have been largely developed in the last 30 years, a brief window with a lack of clearly defined coffee standards. If you ask 10 bakers how to create a standard loaf of French bread, you are likely to get clear instructions on what ingredients should be used to make the dough, as well as very specific baking instructions. But if you ask 10 roasters how to craft a batch of French roast, you will likely get as many answers.

Today's roasters have the challenge of trying to find ourselves in a craft with a lack of ancient tradition, but with the very real advantage of being able to constantly reinvent ourselves and be part of the movement to create the tradition of what future generations will know as specialty coffee. Terry Davis, president of roaster manufacturer Ambex and an active participant in creating tradition in roasting, puts it simply: "The tradition of specialty coffee is that we get better and better."

Since I entered the industry a short time ago, I have experienced this sentiment, as well as a feeling that we are always on the brink of some new discovery or amazing invention that will revolutionize the way society looks at coffee. Without the luxury of hundreds of years to perfect our craft, roasters are still finding ingenious ways to take their coffees a notch higher in quality and consistency. Through extensive testing, clear communication between members of the industry and technological advancement, we have seen marked improvements in roasted coffee.

In today's market, the constant improvement of one's product is absolutely necessary for the successful roaster.

"Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they are not altered for the better designedly" —Sir Francis Bacon

The key to altering coffee for the better is being able to track exactly what you are doing now. This requires patience, dedication and a little help from technology. There are three main areas to look at when deciding where to invest your energy: quality, consistency and efficiency.

QUALITY

If you are new to the roasting profession, advancements in your understanding of quality should be your paramount focus. The days of haphazard roasting with no documentation or analysis are gone.

In the dark ages of roasting (that would be the first wave, for all you new wavers), getting the most out of a given coffee was about as likely as hitting the bull's eye of a dartboard while blindfolded. But with the addition of the bean probe and a stopwatch, roasters can more accurately tailor their adjustments to the specific coffees they are roasting. The widespread use of spreadsheets—both electronic and old-fashioned pen and paper, where time versus temperature measurements can easily be tracked—has increased the learning curve for new roasters dramatically. Michael Whitley of Diedrich Manufacturing, a leading innovator of roasting equipment, says, "A roaster needs to be a complete chef's kitchen, and allow the roastmaster the ability to manipulate the roast as he sees fit."

This has become truer than ever as advancements in quality-oriented technology have been fast and furious of late, making it easier to make quick adjustments to your roaster.

CONSISTENCY

Perhaps the aspect of roasting that has benefited most from forward thinking is the ability to produce a consistent product. The number of roasters who are taking advantage of the proper equipment is increasing dramatically.

Consistency is especially important to the growing wholesale roaster. The market is loyal to local companies, so it will sometimes forgive minor imperfections in a small wholesale roaster's coffee. But as you expand out of your local market, the importance of demonstrating consistency increases, especially as consumers become more educated and their demand for a dependable product grows. People are more tuned than ever to the taste of their morning coffee. Any retailer can confirm that their most loyal patrons place the consistency of the coffee high on the list of why they keep coming back.

Your customers, whether a chain of cafés or just one shop, need you to be reliable for them to succeed, in turn making you successful. "Consistency comes from being able to manage the energy inputs during a roast," says Whitley. This means that your ability to reproduce your product is directly proportional to your ability to adjust the many parameters of the roaster. Adjustments made to settings such as drum speed, cooling fan, airflow and flame have become much easier to track and change. Frequency drives and actuators allow you to make small but impactful adjustments to RPMs and valve positions with the touch of a finger or the turn of a knob.

In the past, changing your drum speed could be a bear and cost you hours of production as you tracked down the necessary sprockets and adjusted the chain before finding out you needed the drum to go just a little faster. Now, with a frequency drive, you can quickly adjust the drum by 1 RPM if need be.

EFFICIENCY

Efficiency is important to roasters of every size. To put it bluntly: It's all about the money. Naturally, the artist in every roaster has a knee-jerk reaction to that statement; specialty coffee is about the romance of the bean, and efficiency is not romantic.

But if your operation can become more efficient without negatively affecting the coffee, you can directly increase the value of your product to the customer. It will allow you to spend more time in the cupping room improving your skills as a taster. And it will save you money on production, giving you the opportunity to invest more into the quality of your green coffee.

The business of roasting specialty coffee is really about the bottom line value received by the customer. Value is a simple equation of the quality of the product, the quality of the experience versus how much it costs. The more efficient you can be, the better you will serve your customers' needs.

WHERE TO START

The area that you choose to work on first—quality, consistency or efficiency—is largely affected by the size and experience of your roasting operation. Most changes you make to your equipment or processes will affect more than one area, but in general, companies that are young and growing should focus on setting a baseline for their quality. Set your expectations for what you want your product to taste like.

From there, consistency becomes the next most important subject. Testing for it can be as simple and inexpensive as using color tiles to check degree of roast, or as costly and complicated as a photo spectrometer that will give you a number index based on the color of the coffee.

Once you have a solid foundation in your quality and consistency, focus on the romance of efficiency. Find ways to get yourself unchained from roasting and packaging equipment so you can focus more on the quality and the value of your product to your customers.

WHAT LIES AHEAD?

So what does the future hold for coffee roasting? The biggest changes in the last few years have come with the advancement of data logging capabilities in roasting equipment. When the idea of profile roasting first came on the specialty scene, a lot of roasters, including myself, felt there was a risk of losing the art of the process. But the opposite has happened. As Whitley puts it, "Temperature ramp rate tracking gives the roasting system the ability to track and measure the increase in temperature, then the roastmaster can take this information offline and analyze it."

This analysis of taste attributes paired with exact measurements of the batch is the key to progress. With profiling, the amount of time it takes to improve a coffee's quality through trial and error is greatly diminished, which, once again, improves not only quality but efficiency. "The latest in roasting technologies have the ability to unchain the roaster from [his] machine," Davis says.

This freedom from the machine allows more time to cup coffees and develop more specific roasting parameters than ever before. Granted, these profiles are not good forever; small changes to temperature, humidity and barometric pressure in your warehouse will affect them. But it gives you that all-important baseline to work from. It is a classic case of John Henry versus the steam engine. You may be able to out-roast a profiling system for a few hours, but what happens when you need to do one of those 10-hour shifts on a hot day in summer?

Ultimately, the cohesion of technology and roasting is inevitable. As Davis says, "We have accepted computers in all other portions of our lives, but we don't want to put them next to the roaster? If you are a professional, it is your responsibility to evaluate what you can do to improve your product."

One thing is clear: Our industry is moving quickly and changing daily. Keeping pace with the competition requires ingenuity and an insatiable curiosity for what possibilities lie within the bean. This doesn't mean you have to sacrifice the romance of coffee to a robot; on the contrary, automated systems allow us the freedom and ability to develop a more in-depth and accurate knowledge of what goes into creating that romance.

 

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