If you roast at all, you have doc­u­men­ta­tion that bogs down your day. Some of it is stu­pid like cre­at­ing the log entry show­ing when you started a purge roast, how much, what lot num­ber, what vari­etal you wasted in order to claim your roaster is now puri­fied so you can do organ­ics. But for the most part, care­ful doc­u­men­ta­tion can dra­mat­i­cally improve your cup qual­ity. How you ask? Let’s delve…

There are three doc­u­ments that, if reli­giously main­tained, your com­pany could improve qual­ity while low­er­ing over­all costs. All busi­ness deci­sions in the roast­ing room can be dri­ven from these infor­ma­tion sources. If you are a micro orga­ni­za­tion, then you can cre­ate sys­tems that will allow you to stream­line oper­a­tions and pos­si­bly put off hir­ing more help for a bit longer. If you have a larger orga­ni­za­tion then you are prob­a­bly keep­ing a lot of this infor­ma­tion already but may not be using the infor­ma­tion across the dis­ci­plines of roast­ing, sourc­ing, blend­ing etc. as well as you could. Let’s look at these three doc­u­ments and see how they work together.

The Roast Log
This is the dri­ver of your oper­a­tions as well as being the ves­sel in which you store your daily data. Many peo­ple don’t even have one, and some that do just record the bare min­i­mums to avoid the Air Quality police and USDA inspec­tors. At it’s best how­ever this doc­u­ment can really make things run effi­ciently in the roast­ing room. This log is not only a story of what has hap­pened but a pre­dic­tor of trends to come. If you are thor­ough you will be able to see how much green you have used. This will set in motion buy­ing deci­sions for restock­ing. It can also be used as the pre­dic­tor over a longer period of what you may need to pur­chase. For the small roaster, pulling the roast log from the last hol­i­day sea­son can give you a nice pre­dic­tor of what you can book for­ward (at a bet­ter price) for next year. The min­i­mum data to be col­lected looks like this on a form:

Roast Profile Sheets
A pro­file sheet is an instru­ment used to cap­ture the data of what hap­pens dur­ing a roast. It has a pri­mary func­tion of record­ing time and tem­per­a­ture changes dur­ing a roast. It should also record con­di­tions that effect the roast­ing such has weather and room conditions.

When you have an ingre­di­ent such as cof­fee, which is often pur­chased in small amounts and sea­son to sea­son, it is impor­tant to be able to iden­tify changes in that cof­fee from lot to lot and year to year. When a new lot of cof­fee is brought in, it is essen­tial at the very least to sam­ple roast the cof­fee and cup for qual­ity con­trol. If the cof­fee is faulty then you can start your meth­ods of recourse. You will want to doc­u­ment your find­ings with, among other things, a roast pro­file sheet and cup­ping notes. When the cof­fee is sub­tly dif­fer­ent is where your doc­u­men­ta­tion becomes cru­cial. You can look back at your notes for the last crop or the last lot and get a feel for what the cof­fee was like in order to com­pare to what you have now.

Another great use of the roast pro­file sheet is dupli­ca­tion of the suc­cess­ful roast. It is not uncom­mon for a roast-master to roast the cof­fee sev­eral dif­fer­ent ways and cup the results. When the per­fect pro­file has been reached it is essen­tial that this is a duplic­a­ble event. Keep a copy of the pro­file on hand so any roaster using your machine can dupli­cate the results you want.

Ambex Coffee Roasters has an excel­lent roast pro­file sheet. It is called the Roast True Log and makes cap­tur­ing data easy to do and is very com­plete. It can be down­loaded from their site in PDF form.

Cupping Results Form
The final form needed to com­plete your records is the cup­ping form. Use the SCAA cup­ping form as it is the indus­try stan­dard. CUP EVERYTHING. By record­ing your results you will be able to iden­tify spec­tac­u­lar cof­fees and then go back up the paper trail to see how you roasted it and how much of the lot you have left.

When you get a new crop in, roast it a few dif­fer­ent ways. Use the roast pro­file sheet to record what hap­pened in the roast­ing process. Then when cup­ping, find the best ver­sion of your lot. Now you take the cup­ping form and attach it to the roast pro­file. This gets filed and you now have a pro­file for this lot and a record for next year.

Stop Doing It On Paper
A few years back they invented this thing called ‘the elec­tronic spread­sheet’. It is way bet­ter than paper! You would use such a thing to eas­ily record all of the data men­tioned above. You can just set up a com­puter near the roaster and record as you go.

Even bet­ter is a ‘data log­ger’. This is a device that actu­ally attaches to the probes of the roaster and records the data for you. Best of all is a pro­file sys­tem that will not only replace the three forms men­tioned above, it will per­form the func­tion of dri­ving the roaster to match your profiles.

For the best options you should call your roaster man­u­fac­turer and see what the rec­om­mend sys­tem is for your unit. If you don’t have bud­get right now, break out a spread­sheet and start your own forms.

All of the data you col­lect will be of some value. From being able to report to the air qual­ity board, organic and social pro­grams, and inven­tory con­trol to roast pro­files and cup­ping pro­files to drive con­sis­tency and qual­ity. All of this data should help you drive down costs and improve qual­ity. This makes doc­u­men­ta­tion seem less like drown­ing in all the paper­work and more like gain­ing con­trol of your roast­ing room.