Roasting practices have come a long way in the past few decades. Today we enjoy an incredible wealth of information, resources, and sharing of technique to help us be better roasters. With all these tools a techniques available to us it can be hard to sort out the most helpful and practical bits to apply to our coffee roasting operations. This is precisely the problem today’s iconic guest, Scott Rao, set out to solve with his latest book, “Coffee Roasting: Best Practices”
Scott Rao has been in the coffee business for over 25 years as a cafe owner, roaster, consultant, and author. The Coffee Roaster’s Companion and Coffee Roasting: Best Practices have influenced a generation of roasters and shaped the global roasting vocabulary and conversation. Scott’s popular Instagram account @whereisscottrao offers expert-level tips and discussion about coffee brewing and roasting.
I have known Scott for a long time and he has truly been a catalyst and force for deeper exploration of coffee brewing and roasting inspiring a lot of conversation and adoption of techniques that push the industry forward to higher levels of consistency and quality.
In this conversation we are not only going to be diving deep into technical aspects of his new book, “Coffee Roasting: Best Practices” but we will also be talking about the philosophies and mindsets toward roasting that we have had in the past and need to have in the future if we are to grow and faithfully represent a coffee’s potential to our customers.
We will cover:
- Major shifts in roasting over the years
- What roast curves can and cannot tell you
- Most common mistakes roasters make
- How software revolutionized roasting
- Defining “Best Practices”
- 2 most important factors in approaching a new coffee
- Factoring in moisture levels
- Setting reasonable parameters
- How our roasting impacts the producer
- Sample roasting
- Development Time Ratio (DTR)
- How to cup others coffees to assess
- Scotts thoughts on what closely held beliefs will change in the future
Links:
Related episodes to listen to next:
RoR #1: A Conversation w/ Anne Cooper of Equilibrium Master Roasters
RoR #5: Time and Color in Roasting w/ Morten Munchow of Coffee Mind”
242 : A Conversation with James Hoffmann
168 : How to get the Best from your Coffee w/ WBC 2013 Champ, Pete Licata
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