Post-Roast Blending with RoastLog Green Inventory
So… what about post-roast blending? We get asked about that often. The current version of the RoastLog Green Inventory System stops keeping track of things as soon as they go into the roaster, yet one of the benefits of the Green Inventory System is tracking exactly how you are using green coffees and the real cost to roast them. We know people want support for post-roast blending, and it will make it’s way into the product. In the short term there is a way to track your post-roast blends.
RoastLog fully supports pre-roast blending, but many, many people exclusively blend post-roast. With a clear understanding of Roastables (the ways coffees are used) and the blending feature in RoastLogger you can track your post roast blends.
Let’s be completely clear on terminology by defining “pre” and “post” roast blending.
A pre-roast blend is two or more green coffees roasted together in the same batch. We built RoastLog with this exact workflow in mind, so that inventory is automatically adjusted when you roast this type of blend.
Post-roast blending is two or more batches of roasted, single origin coffee mixed together once they’ve left the roaster. With RoastLog, this is not inherently supported; however, it’s still possible, and here’s how:
Using a specific example of a blend called Gaute-maul-an, which is a 50/50 post-roast blend of two Guatemalan coffees, a Huehuetenango and Rio Azul.
First, create three Roastables:
- “Guat Huehue PR” so you can profile that SO coffee specifically for the Guate-maul-an blend
- “Guat Rio Azul PR” so you can profile that SO coffee specifically for the Guate-maul-an blend
- “Guate-maul-an PR Blend” for your Guate-maul-an post-roast blend, made up 50% “Guat Huehue PR” and 50% “Guat Rio Azul PR”
Now, for the roasting. Here’s how to do a 20lb batch:
The Roast Queue in RoastLogger for setting up a post-roast blend
- add “Guate-maul-an PR Blend” to the queue, entering 20 for starting mass. You’ll use this roastable to tell the inventory system:
- 10 lbs of the “Guat Huehue PR” were roasted and used in your Guate-maul-an PR Blend
- 10 lbs of “Guat Rio Azul PR” were roasted and used used your in Guate-maul-an PR Blend
- add “Guat Huehue PR” to the queue, entering 0 for starting mass
- add “Guat Rio Azul PR” to the queue, entering 0 for starting mass
- Record a couple seconds and save the Guate-maul-an PR Blend from step #1. The point here is just to trigger the inventory system.
- Now actually roast and log the two other batches.
So, in the end, inventory is reduced correctly and usage data is recorded. You’ll also have complete profiles for the individual components stored in a way that lets you easily find them later.
Next time, using this same technique, I’ll explain how to handle a batch of coffee that will be split up post-roast for different uses.
Frying a turkey with software
This Thanksgiving I wanted to fry a turkey. It’s all the rage and I had heard how fantastic the turkey tastes. There are all sorts of warnings and videos about frying turkeys and burning your house down (it’d be seriously fun to be one of these firemen!)
Not only did I not want to light myself, family or house on fire, but I also didn’t want to burn or overcook my turkey. Enter RoastLog.
My TurkeyLog setup. Four gallons of 350F peanut oil in the pot on the left, MacBook Pro and RoastLog Data Bridge on the high tech laptop stand on the right.
RoastLog started off its life as a temperature recording system with a little web software to store and interact with that data. Since then, we’ve grown to include a much richer set of features for managing inventory, analyzing green coffee purchase prices and fees, etc. Still, we retain the ability to measure, record and visualize temperature readings in real-time of pretty much anything you can reach with a thermocouple.
I grabbed a type-J thermocouple and drilled the correct size hole in lid of my fryer to measure the oil temp, securing the TC with a small metal binder clip. Since the Data Bridge can measure up to four temperatures, I put a type-k thermocouple at the base of the pot in between the pot and burner. I didn’t know what to expect measuring the burner temp, but thought it’d be fun. With that, I lit the burner and was off.
Oil temperature during the warmup
After about a minute I got a very nice linear warm-up for the oil temperature. As you can see in the screenshot above, the burner TC was reading about 850F. One of the neat features of the updated UI is the ability to selectively turn on/off certain TCs on the plot. It was nice to see the burner temperature, but I didn’t always want it on the plot for scaling reasons.
Oil (red) and burner temperature (green) during the warmup
The warmup phase went well and was thankfully uneventful. Once I got the oil to 350 it was show time. I had my old welding gloves from college and wore those while very slowly lowering the bird into the oil. Putting that sucker in four gallons of 350 degree oil was a bit scary at first. The welding gloves were a late addition since I didn’t know exactly where I had put them, but I was damn happy that I had found ‘em.
Gently placing the turkey in the oil. Note the thermocouple sticking through the lid, attached to the Data Bridge.
Once the lid was back on the pot and thermocouple in the oil I could see that oil temperature was dropping. Just like coffee roasting, this was the result of putting something cold into something hot. I cranked up the heat of the burner to get back to 350F as quickly as possible. During that phase of my fry the burner temperature got up to about 1100F. It took roughly 2 1/2 minutes to hit the turn-around time where the oil starting increasing in temperature…a bit longer than a typical coffee roast.
Now, here’s the part where RoastLog really helped. Because I had a visual representation of the temperature, I could see when I was getting close to my target of 350F and the rate at which the oil temp was increasing. As I approached 350F, I backed the heat down bit by bit and tried to just touch and then stabilize at 350. Below is the zoomed-in plot from roastlog.com. You can see it for yourself here as well…to zoom in simply click and drag on the chart: http://roastlog.com/roasts/zambrano-coffee/46/
Oil temperature near 350F
As you can see, I didn’t stray too far from my 350F target. I was continuing just fine through minute 24 when I noticed a slight ramp up in temperature. In terms of degrees, it wasn’t that much above 350, but due to RoastLog I was able to see the trajectory and that it would quickly become an issue if I let it continue. Back down came the burners so low that I actually killed the flame….doh! If you look at the subplot on the website or burner temp (green) below you can actually see a huge drop in burner temperature when the flame was out. It wasn’t that big of an issue really….once the burner was re-lit I got back on track.
Full recording of oil and burner temperatures. There's a big drop in burner temp when I accidentally killed the flame.
Being able to remove the oil temperature from the plot while recording was great, since the scales were so much different.
Oil temperature
The result? Delicious. I didn’t light anyone on fire, had a great time and produced a great tasting turkey for the family. I’m looking forward to doing this again. With a longer thermocouple I think I can actually log the internal temperature of the turkey which would be the ultimate in turkey perfection.
User Interface Iterations
User interface design is a tricky beast. It’s part art and part science…not programming. The fact that the majority UIs suck, to me, speaks to how hard it is to design a good UI.
With our 4-input Data Bridge, there are some tough UI issues which we need to tackle. What’s the “best” way to display 1-4 roasting curves in RoastLogger? In the first iteration, I came up something which I thought made sense: create one main plot which can be though of as the “most important” along with three sub-plots.
Our current 4-input RoastLogger UI
The feedback Ryan received from folks was that they wanted to have all of these plots on one chart. Originally, I thought this was totally insane. With up to four curves for the current roast, and up to four for a previous roast drawn in the background, we now have up to eight curves drawn on one chart. Insanity! Indeed, making sense of eight curves on one plot is hard to impossible. Ryan came up with an initial layout which had some controls over which charts to show or hide. But now, just because a curve is toggled off for a given thermocouple doesn’t mean people aren’t interested in the temperature. Hrm, what to do?
Since we’re reworking the UI with the charts, it’s a good time to look at other aspects of the UI beyond the chart. When adding the three subplots, we took away some vertical resolution which meant that it’s a bit hard to see subtle changes in temperature. Realizing we needed to give back some vertical resolution, it was pretty obvious that the notes panel at the very bottom of the window was taking up more that it’s fair share as well.
So, our goals are:
- maximize vertical resolution
- allow fine controls over charts
- provide clear readings for time and all four temperatures
With all of this and some prototyping, we settled on the following changes:
- all curves are drawn on one plot
- provide off/on toggles for curve 2, 3 and 4
- provide off/on toggles for all curves in previous roast profiles
- move all Heads-up Display elements into the chart (time, temp and buttons)
- move notes into a vertical panel
Wireframe of 4-input RoastLogger UI version 2
This really opens up the vertical space proving more room for the chart to draw curves. Inside the chart, the four TC temperatures will be displayed in real-time while roasting (that little table-looking thing). Checkboxes next to those thermocouple readings toggle the lines for the current or previous roasting profiles. For users who don’t need all four TCs, the inputs which do not find a TC plugged in to the Data Bridge will be automatically hidden. The Notes panel which doesn’t need a ton of real estate get’s kicked over to the right and is oriented vertically along with the events panel. However, the Notes panel can now be hidden so if it’s not needed, simply close it and keep it out of sight. The Roast Queue and Starred Roasts profiles panel remains the same, except that it can now be much wider since the HUD has been moved.
For those who really want to maximize the chart, it’s fairly simple. Each of these panels is moveable and close-able. Below is a wireframe of what it would look like when orienting the toolbar vertically and completely closing the Notes and Events panels.
Maximizing the chart in RoastLogger
These changes just need a bit more coding and testing, after which we’ll be releasing RoastLogger 2.1.2. I think this is a much better design and hope that it’s easier to work with.
RoastLog fall update
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a stale blog. Embarrassingly, this poor blog hasn’t seen much love lately, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. Here are a few highlights about how we spent our summer.
4-input Data Bridge
Jeez…we’ve been talking about this for so long even I’m getting a bit sick of it. However, I’m extremely happy that this little guy is now available! We rushed to get the hardware ready in time for SCAA in Houston, but still had a ton of integration work to do with our software. There were a few database changes, UI tweaks and odds and ends to clean up so that we could easily support one or four charts. For the last few weeks our testers have been logging roasts daily with these devices…yee-haw! Of course, we identified a few things to fix and have been doing so diligently.
When you sign-up with RoastLog you’ll have the option of logging with our four-input device or our original one-input. Once you log into the RoastLogger client software, it will automatically detect which device you have and the UI will adjust itself out appropriately.
There is still some work do to in order to use a subset of those four charts, but it’s coming. I’d like to give users the option of using one, two, three or all four plots and have the layout be more flexible. Some folks like side-by-side to get more vertical resolution while others prefer the layout below. Drag-and-drop to reorganize? With this update I completely switched out the charting library in RoastLogger, so we have a lot more options which is very very nice.
Software updates
One of the things I’ve been working on most recently is making our software better overall….fixing bugs, designing better in-application messaging systems, working on new-user experience, etc. It’s been a lot of fun actually. As a software guy, it’s always fun to tackle new problems and build new systems. However, there are always these little annoyances (i.e., bugs) which eat away at me, and are sources of frustration for users.
The latest version of RoastLogger has a few of those fixes as well as some enhancements which make it easier for users to know when there is a problem. At the same time, the website has undergone a few enhancements and fixes. If you’re a customer, you may have noticed a little message recently announcing RoastLogger 2.1.1. This system will allow us to better notify folks about system updates.
Support portal
One thing we all obsess over is providing excellent customer support. The best part of running your own business is talking to your customers and deciding that you’re going to treat them like you want to be treated. Two weeks ago we launched our new customer support portal which will help us do a better job of helping you:
http://support.roastlog.com/
Our goal is to get back to everyone within 24 hours with an answer. Most often, we’ll get back within a couple of hours. Better yet is that this system (powered by the good folks as Assistly) provides a great search system through common questions and issues. Our hope is that this system will take the hard work out of finding answers to common questions.
Planning for 2012
Since joining us shortly after the SCAA show this year, Linsey has been busting his butt getting our sales and marketing efforts organized. We’re also all signed up for the SCAA show in 2012, so plan on saying hi to us in Portland (Portland…thank you SCAA). We still have a big vision for RoastLog and are doing our best to build software which every coffee roaster will want to have. Hopefully 2012 will see us get even closer to that vision!
Inventory and an Introduction
What’s been going on with RoastLog since the SCAA show in Houston last month? Well, we are on track to launch our much anticipated inventory management system. Ryan has been leading the charge, feverishly interviewing a dedicated group of beta testers to finalize the look and feel of the system we will finally be introducing in the coming weeks. We’re really excited to present an inventory system that has been developed specifically for the needs of coffee roasters.
Green coffee inventory presents unique challenges and we have build a system to address these issues. Take for example the fact that most roasters have limited space to store the green coffee that they have purchased. You might have bought a container of coffee that will satisfy your roasting needs for the next six months but, you can only store a couple of pallets of that coffee in your roasting facility at one time. No problem, you can keep your coffee at a green warehouse like the Annex and pull bags and pallets as needed. But how does this impact your inventory? After you add in the price per pound charge for storage and shipping, those bags you pulled last month were cheaper than what you are pulling now. The same coffee stored at different locations is ultimately going to have an impact on your cost of goods sold. Chances are the system you use now, whether it’s QuickBooks, Peachtree or your own tricked out Google Docs spreadsheet, is going to require a lot of manual data entry to get the numbers to justify and create accurate reports. The RoastLog inventory system takes the pain out of tracking this kind of information; we did this by listening to coffee roasters, understanding their needs and building a system that works. The system accounts for multiple storage locations, multiple roasting locations, movement of coffee and pricing variability.
Words on the screen are probably too abstract to fully explain what the RoatLog inventory system is all about. Because of this we are planning to offer a series of webinars that will explain how the system works. More news coming soon.
Linsey is Back
If you visited the RoastLog booth at the SCAA show, you may have had the pleasure of meeting Linsey Fan. As I mentioned in a previous blog, Linsey was involved with the prototype version of RoastLog a few years back but, now he has agreed to rejoin the team in a more formal capacity. Linsey’s background in sales and marketing is going to be a big help for our small company. Already Linsey is taking charge of our sales program, following up with roasters who expressed interest in the RoastLog system. Don’t be surprised if you get a call for Linsey in the coming weeks!
