Building the ultimate software tools for specialty coffee

Social Roasting is Here!

About a week ago, without much fanfare, we added a new feature to the RoastLog website. If you’ve been following us on Twitter you can probably guess what I’m talking about. It’s not a huge change but we think it could have pretty large implications in the way that roasters share information with each other. We’ve taken to calling it “social roasting.” Basically it is a way to share your roasting philosophy by sharing roast profiles that have been logged Read more…

By ted, ago

If only your inventory system did this…

I’ve been chatting with roasters lately about inventory, which we’ve said all along was the next major thing we’d be working on. Turns out that the roasters I’ve spoken with all have a few struggles handling inventory in just they way they’d like. “Affordable” off-the-shelf inventory software just doesn’t work for specialty coffee, and the cash outlay required for a system that can meet the needs of specialty roasters is prohibitive. Imagine, if you will…. As the head roaster at Read more…

By ryan, ago

August updates

We usually send these updates directly to our users via email, but thought blogging about the updates going on over here may be interesting to a wider audience. This past Friday, when the rest of the coffee world was (hopefully) getting some rest and relaxation, we rolled out about a month’s worth of new work to roastlog.com, in addition to building an updated version of the RoastLogger client application.  I’m happy to say that RoastLogger 0.9.5 is ready for immediate Read more…

By brianz, ago

Roasters Guild Retreat in Retrospect

Over the past weekend more than two hundred roasters descended on the Skamania Lodge in Stevenson, Washington for the tenth annual Roasters Guild Retreat. There were a variety of activities that took place including peer tasting calibrations, grind and particle size analysis and round table discussions on issues related to the need for Fair Trade certification within the specialty coffee community and the importance of so-called relationship coffees in a time of high market prices. The greatest enthusiasm however seemed to be focused on the Challenge Cup competition, sponsored Read more…

By ted, ago

Coffee cupping and the numbers

Ted’s last blog post on the future of coffee cupping was very well-timed.  In the latest issue of Roast Magazine, there’s a great pair of articles which take two stances on the numeric scoring system which is found throughout the specialty coffee industry: http://bit.ly/bOUXXk The first article, by Shawn Steinman of Coffea Consulting, argues against numeric scoring for coffee, while the other by Ken Davids, discusses how number have helped the industry and consumers.  I was quite impressed with how Read more…

By brianz, ago

New and Improved – The Future of Coffee Rating

When I’m not working on RoastLog business, I am the assistant editor at Coffee Review and a coffee consultant with Kenneth Davids Consulting. When people ask me what I do for a living I usually pause for a moment and then finally say, I’m a coffee taster. It’s a lot easier than saying I cup, evaluate, write, train, make purchasing recommendations, assure quality, sample roast and so on. In the end it is coffee tasting that informs my work life. Read more…

By ted, ago

Is it OK to be funny?

So, here’s the thing… Sometimes companies are straight-up serious. It’s all business all the time. It’s not funny. Other businesses allow, even push, a sense of humor. Consider MailChimp. We use this web application to help us manage email lists and send out emails to our customers and potential customers. MailChimp is serious in that they are clearly very aware of the importance of email marketing as well as the dangers. RoastLog is a real company providing a real service. Read more…

By ryan, ago

Watching roasting statistics develop

One thing I find fascinating is trends and statistics.  I have some monitoring set up using munin so that we can keep track of all sorts of server stats….number of web requests served, MySQL queries, memory usage, etc.  It’s all that good stuff that any good (or paranoid) web developer wants to know about. Looking at the number of database requests, it’s very obvious where the weekends land since the queries are way down. Munin is pretty flexible, so I Read more…

By brianz, ago

It’s all about Quality in the Cup.

Quality. It’s what makes specialty coffee special. Over the last several years, it has been really great to see an increasing number of roasters pushing the envelope of coffee quality. Sourcing great coffee through development of new relationships between farmers/millers and importers/roasters surely has had an impact, slow but steady, on the increase in quality coffee available to consumers. Roasters can be a deferential bunch, often responding to queries of “why does your coffee taste so good?” with, “all the Read more…

By ted, ago

RoastLog is good for business

Our reason for existing is to help coffee roasters do their jobs. That means increased efficiency, greater consistency in your product, greater accuracy in your adjustments to roast profiles, faster training of new employees, and greater pleasure in the act of roasting coffee. First, RoastLog is simply a set of tools that artisan roasters can use while continuing to roast just as they have been, having their hands on the airflow, gas knob, trier. etc. By automatically logging data, allowing Read more…

By ryan, ago