Who the hell is RoastLog?

Brian provided a brief introduction to RoastLog last week, but who is he, and who the hell are these partners he suggests might exist?

Brian Zambrano

Brian is a geek through and through.  Originally he studied Materials Engineering at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, CA.  During his studies, he had some pretty cool internships at Space Systems Loral and NASA.  While at NASA, he worked on space shuttle thermal protection (tiles) where burning things up in really hot furnaces, with PID controllers, was a daily event.  Eventually, he moved to writing software, finishing off another degree in Computer Science, and has been doing that since approximately 2003.

So why work on software for coffee?  Well, he’s also a rock climber, and during a climbing trip in France during the summer of 2002, he was picked up a mean espresso habit and was amazed at the coffee quality compared to the USA.  A new bar was set and his interest permanently piqued. Soon after, he began home roasting and eventually graduated from the iRoast2 to a Diedrich IR7 to try his hand at being a “real” coffee roaster (while keeping his day job, of course).  As he became more acquainted with roasting and met more people who also roasted he found that data tracking was

1. Extremely important
2. Not always done
3. If done, done in a way which made it hard to correlate information

This grand vision of what we now call RoastLog wouldn’t go away since these problems simply weren’t being solved. Brian is the driving force behind the company, moving the business forward and providing the engineering and programming skills that are the backbone of our applications.

Ted Stachura

Ted is a coffee cupper, roaster, writer and trainer currently working as the assistant editor for the online publication Coffee Review, as well a consultant for Kenneth Davids Consulting. He has a long history in the coffee industry, holding a variety of positions at Peet’s Coffee and Tea, including program manager of coffee and tea training. As our coffee and coffee business expert, Ted brings years of industry experience to RoastLog and will continue to be instrumental in making sure our software does what it needs to do for roasters and does so in way that makes people want to use it. Brian and Ted met through a mutual friend, and Brian quickly saw how important Ted could be in getting RoastLog into the hands of roasters who have been all but clamoring for a data logging and analysis tool that was not a pencil and graph paper, a spreadsheet, or an expensive solution that in most cases was only available with the purchase of a new roaster.

Ryan Brown

Ryan is RoastLog’s “Front End Guy”. What he builds is what you see when you use RoastLog. He is also responsible for the design of the software and knows that the most awesomely cool software that can do the most amazingly useful things and can instantly bump up profit margins is pretty useless if it, well, sucks to use. Ryan believes in designing software for the people who use it, and he will not stop until he sees people using RoastLog with happy looks on their faces. Brian and Ryan met as computer science students at San Francisco State University where they partnered in an operating systems course. They kept infrequent contact until Brian was looking for some programming help on a little coffee roast data logging program.

So who the hell is RoastLog?

In short, RoastLog is three guys who want to provide useful, dare we say delightful, software tools for coffee roasters, tools that help roasters create the best possible product. In the end we want to play a part in furthering the movement that is already bringing a better cup of coffee to more and more people everywhere.

We’ve seen many coffee professionals struggle with software simply because it wasn’t designed for you.  Excel is great for financial spreadsheets, but using it to track a year’s worth of roasting data is just painful.  The three of us aim to change that, by asking you questions about what you need, what would make your job easier and how a piece of software can help to improve the coffee that ends up in your customers’ cups.  We’re building software for you, to solve your problems.