We’re RoastLog, and here to help

In 2007 I went to the SCAA show in Minneapolis as a “consumer member”.  At that point, the coffee bug had bitten me hard enough to that I felt it necessary to drop over $1000 to rub shoulders with industry folks, but more importantly take a bunch of classes.  An engineer and software guy by trade, I’d been geeking out with home roasting for about a year, and thought some classes would be great fun and very helpful.  The conference was fantastic, but back to the point.

I ended up taking two roasting classes: Intro to Craft Roasting and Intermediate Craft Roasting.  Until then, I had only roasted on my small iRoast2, so getting some time with a professional roaster was very cool.  In the “intermediate” class, the plan was to roast three different batches with three different roast profiles.  My small group walked up to the roaster and each of us held a sheet of graph paper which looked like it was copied 531 times.  Every minute, someone in our group would call out the current temperature and everyone would write it down. At the end, we’d hand draw the roasting curve.

During this, I was thinking, “Are you guys serious?  Is this really how you do things?  I did this when I was an engineering student in 1995.  I can build something that does this automatically.”

When I got home, I began building a system for logging coffee with a computer.

That was three years ago and the system has evolved significantly, partners come and gone, but what we have now is the start of the real deal.  RoastLog isn’t just for logging roasting data….it’s for logging everything you need to keep track of if you’re a coffee professional.  There have been, and are, other people trying to come up with solutions to this problem.  However, I can promise you that RoastLog is the most full-featured end-to-end integrated solution out there.   Everything we’ve designed and built in-house with the goal of making the job of coffee professionals everyone much easier.

We’re now in private beta mode and working with a select group of roasters.  This group will remain small until April 16, 2010 when the exhibit hall at the SCAA show opens up.  Until then, keep reading here and follow us on Twitter to learn more about what we’re building and who we are.