If you are in the planning stages of your business, you are in luck. We get the challenges that new startups face. We want to help you get your roastery off the ground. This is why we’re excited to introduce a new program that allows qualified startups to use RoastLog for up to *one year for free! This is a way for us to “pay-it-forward” and to acknowledge the help we have received on our journey. When we set out to Read more…
From day one, RoastLogger, our client application used for recording roast profiles, has had a “Roast Queue”. The idea behind it is pretty simple. When you start your roasting day, you know what you’re going to be roasting and, roughly, in what order. The Roast Queue provides a visual record and reminder of what you’ve done, what you’re doing and what you still need to do. Since RoastLog is a profiling system *and* an inventory management system, this works great. Enter Read more…
Things have been heating up over here at RoastLog. Working with customers is always one of the best parts of our jobs, and we’ve been cranking out some great new features based on user feedback. Today, I wanted to highlight one of those. You know you roast coffee, and you have a sense of how much coffee you’re roasting…but just how long is that seven bags going to last you? Now, users of our inventory system can leave that math Read more…
Who can guess where this screen shot is taken from? If you guess RoastLogger version 0.3 circa 2009, you’re right! Notice there is a little field in there called “Heating Rate”. That thing made it into the earliest versions of RoastLogger, but I took it out since I never had the time to really calculate an accurate value. Around here, we will often not tackle a problem until we have a solution that we’re mostly happy with. It’s taken some Read more…
Right now the guys and I are sitting in downtown Portland getting in some last minute work (online cupping forms anyone? http://cuppinglog.com, plus we’re launching a new homepage!). This is the third year in a row that we’ll have a booth at the SCAA show. The entire weekend is exhausting, but exhilarating for our little start-up. One of the most rewarding parts of working on RoastLog for me personally has been the stories from our users. When folks tell us that our Read more…
I’m very very excited to talk about some long requested RoastLogger features which will be landing in the next week or so. Cutting straight to the chase, they are: Improved feedback when a roast doesn’t upload successfully Spacebar shortcut for starting and saving a roast Selectable profiles in the Roast Queue Drum roll…….ability to re-order items in the Roast Queue Improved feedback when a roast doesn’t upload successfully There you are, roasting your coffee with RoastLogger fired up. You click Read more…
Linsey has been doing a killer job of hitting the pavement and talking with our customers. He came to me a few weeks ago with a new feature request: add the ability to track and schedule servicing records for roasters. With a little bit of work, I’m happy to unveil this neat new feature of RoastLog. The main idea is that everyone services their roaster from time-to-time. However, just like changing your oil, sometimes you forget when you did that, Read more…
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 Read more…
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. RoastLog started off its life as a temperature Read more…
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 Read more…