Welcome to Roast Podcast.

In this episode, Roast publisher Connie Blumhardt talks with Colby Barr, co-owner of Verve Coffee Roasters—the 2024 Macro Roaster of the Year winner—featured in Issue 120: November | December 2023. Read the article here.

With Roast Podcast, listen at your own convenience and keep up with the latest research, knowledge and insights from scientists, subject matter experts and professionals from across the industry.

Listen to Roast Podcast on:
SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Excerpt From the Article

“Since the beginning, Verve has focused on working directly with producers whenever possible. ‘When Ryan O’Donovan and I started this, direct trade was being formed and … all of our peers were out there doing it,’ says Colby Barr. They looked to the early pioneers of direct trade to figure out what coffee sourcing meant, ‘and apparently it meant you just travel around the world a lot and go meet people,’ he adds. ‘So we started doing that really early with no clue. … I can tell you firsthand, we were winging it hard but we were getting after it, and we were becoming successful.’”

Advertisement

Welcome to Roast Podcast.

In this episode, Roast publisher Connie Blumhardt talks with Gregory Ward and Evan Iluzada of Bridge City Coffee, the 2024 Micro Roaster of the Year winner, featured in Issue 120: November | December 2023. Read the article here.

With Roast Podcast, listen at your own convenience and keep up with the latest research, knowledge and insights from scientists, subject matter experts and professionals from across the industry.

Listen to Roast Podcast on:
SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Excerpt From the Article

“After working his way up from bartender to executive director of a church-run community event space, Ward decided to pursue a master’s degree in business leadership. “I was fascinated with leadership,” he says. “Not the admin side of running a business or the numbers, but what makes the best leader. How can a leader draw out the best in the people they’re leading?” One day, as he witnessed a fast-food worker being treated “like garbage” by a co-worker and their manager, he recalls, he told his wife that someday he wanted “to create a place where entry-level employees in the service industry can be treated with dignity, shown value and that they matter.”

Advertisement

By Emily Puro

Gregory Ward held a lot of jobs before opening Bridge City Coffee—Roast’s 2024 Micro Roaster of the Year—but one common thread connected them all: the genuine desire to make a difference in the world and in the lives of others.

To that end, Bridge City, founded in 2017, has set some lofty goals for a small company in the service industry, including “reclaiming work to empower and equip people through it,” and “removing all commoditization of people from the coffee supply chain,” according to the company’s application for Roaster of the Year. And while “impact is first and foremost,” Ward says, “we refuse to pursue that in a way that comes at the cost of an excellent product.”

After working his way up from bartender to executive director of a church-run community event space, Ward decided to pursue a master’s degree in business leadership. “I was fascinated with leadership,” he says. “Not the admin side of running a business or the numbers, but what makes the best leader. How can a leader draw out the best in the people they’re leading?” One day, as he witnessed a fast-food worker being treated “like garbage” by a co-worker and their manager, he recalls, he told his wife that someday he wanted “to create a place where entry-level employees in the service industry can be treated with dignity, shown value and that they matter.”

Around that same time, while working as a consultant and board member for a nonprofit coffee company in Denver called Purple Door, which hires and trains formerly homeless youth, he began to realize that coffee could be the ideal focus for his dream. “It is a beautiful vehicle for impact,” he says. “What attracted me to it was that we could have a relationship from the start to the finish with everyone involved in the process, and relationship is so crucial to me and what we do.”

When Ward and his wife decided to move to Greenville, South Carolina, her hometown, he started doing “recon trips” to scope out the coffee scene and connect with local nonprofits. He found Greenville primed for specialty coffee, and many of the nonprofits he met with were on board with his vision to build a bridge between organizations supporting youth job development and a real-world for-profit employer.

Bridge City hires at least 25 percent of its staff through nonprofits that work with youth who have experienced barriers to employment, offering stable and supportive jobs where they can gain career skills along with a sense of their own intrinsic value. Most of the nonprofits work with high school students, and while they provide support until the students graduate, Ward says, “once the participants phase out, there’s often no support.” Bridge City’s goal is to equip them for life after high school and/or provide a place for them to continue working after graduation. Whether they’re hired through partner organizations or not, nearly all Bridge City new hires are young people between the ages of 17 and 25 who can use some support launching into successful adulthood.

Supporting Staff is Central to the Mission

Bridge City often hires staff with no professional coffee experience, with the goal of helping them develop skills they can use to grow their careers in or out of the industry. And because most of these new hires have experienced obstacles to success in their lives, the company provides a wide range of support and training that extends well beyond coffee and customer service.

One example is the company’s partnership with AllOne Health, which offers free life coaching, mental health counseling, legal counsel, healthcare advocacy, crisis support, financial planning, debt management and more. Employees can also opt into low-cost non-catastrophic health care, with the company paying half the monthly premium. Bridge City’s accountant and bank have presented financial literacy trainings for staff as well.

The trainings are helpful, says Gabriel Clark, a barista and shift lead who has been with Bridge City for more than three years, but the strong relationships staff have forged with company leaders are in many ways even more valuable. “The biggest thing for me personally, and I think for a lot of people,” he says, “is just having those conversations on a day-to-day basis about what the financial world looks like, and then when any of us have any kind of issue, car trouble or some kind of insurance-related thing or just bills or things like that, we can talk to the people because we have that trust. We have that kind of reliance on each other.”

Another tangible way the company supports staff is through its Bridge Fund. When staff apply for assistance through the fund, they meet with a committee to explain their current need, then they receive financial coaching by a professional accountant to help them develop practical skills to deal with life’s unexpected setbacks. Depending on the situation, assistance might involve help with budgeting, a matched savings program or financial resources to help with the immediate need.

Money for the fund comes mainly through the company’s Bridge Card, a $3 gift card that customers can purchase and gift to others. All of the proceeds go directly into the Bridge Fund. Other funding has been provided by partner businesses and individual donors. Ward has looked into making the Bridge Fund a nonprofit so staff wouldn’t have to pay taxes on any money they receive, but that’s proven challenging legally. To offset that, the company pays directly for services, such as car repairs, whenever possible.

At times, just getting support to figure things out is enough. Zion Lewis, a barista and shift lead with Bridge City, has applied to the Bridge Fund twice, once to help with dental expenses and once after a car accident left her without reliable transportation. “For both occasions, because of coaching and working with our financial advisor,” she says, “I was able to save what I needed.”

“This was honestly one of the most successful experiences with the Bridge Fund,” says Ward. “The goal is to empower people, not create dependence, and Zion realized how much she could do on her own.”

And more support is on the horizon. Earlier this year, administrative coordinator Lydia Shedd implemented an entrepreneur operating system—a dynamic strategic planning tool to help the company envision and set goals for the near and long-term future.

“We started talking about all the things that seemed unimaginable, and then just anything was on the table,” says Evan Iluzada, director of green coffee and Waco operations. “This is the kind of thing that gives me chills, even right now, when I’m talking about it. These are the dreaming moments of what we can become as an organization.”

One of the most ambitious short-term goals is to secure two multi-tenant housing units within walking or biking distance of the company’s cafes. Employees will apply to live in the units for up to a year, beginning with zero to very low rent, which will increase quarterly until it reaches market rate. In that way, employees without the safety net of savings will be able to save enough to secure their own housing, transportation and other necessities.

It’s no surprise staff turnover at Bridge City is low. According to the company’s Roaster of the Year application, “In over three years, we have retained 80 percent of our staff. Of the 20 percent who have moved on, 30 percent have gone on to promotions in the coffee industry and approximately 40 percent have moved into promotions for their own professional careers.”

Even Clark, who recently earned a bachelor’s degree and has seen his career options expand considerably, says, “It’s going to take a lot for me to leave.”

Staff Development and Training

In addition to providing support for employees’ personal growth, the company has developed comprehensive trainings related to customer service (which it calls “the guest experience”) and specialty coffee.

The guest experience is a huge focus for Bridge City, with every interaction viewed as relational rather than transactional. All employees are trained using the company’s Bridge Guest Experience handbook, which emphasizes authentic communication and a welcoming atmosphere.

Coffee-related training is equally comprehensive, with the company developing its own “Raising the Bar-ista” training program for employees. The program will eventually include three levels—though levels 2 and 3 are still being finalized—each comprising knowledge- and skills-based components. The level 1 course, which all employees are required to complete, starts with basics such as where coffee comes from and different brewing methods, as well as customer service and communication fundamentals. Levels 2 and 3 will be optional for employees who are interested in learning more and advancing their careers in the coffee industry. Employees are recognized for achieving each level with a pay raise and a pin to wear on their apron.

Raising the Bar-ista is a first step in another big dream that came out of Bridge City’s entrepreneur operating system brainstorming sessions—to open Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) training facilities in Greenville, South Carolina, and Waco, Texas, where the company has a second roastery. “It’s so much aligned with who we are as an organization,” says Iluzada, “because we want to give people more opportunities to grow in the industry and give our employees more opportunities for growth.”

In addition to these formal training programs, staff meetings often include educational components, and every employee meets with a member of the leadership team quarterly to discuss their own aspirations.

Seeking Out Like-Minded Partners

With such a strong core mission, it’s important to Bridge City leadership to partner with organizations, businesses and individuals who share the same values. Quoting one of Bridge City’s importing partners, Iluzada says, “In the absence of values, all decisions are made for profit. That really encompasses the type of organization we want to be because it aligns well with our mission to build value and hope in people through coffee.”

To amplify that mission, Iluzada continues, Bridge City considers a few simple questions when selecting partners throughout the supply chain: “What are your values? What is your mission? What are the pillars of your organization? And can we feel good about partnering with you?”

For now, Bridge City is largely focused on investing in its staff, but it partners with importers who are working to improve livelihoods and sustainability at origin. That’s not to say the company hasn’t made investments at origin. It’s committed to paying above market value for quality coffee, and before opening its first shop and turning its attention to supporting its employees, Bridge City helped fund a community childcare center for an all-female producer group in Rwanda. As the company grows, Ward says, “We are looking forward to getting back into being able to do more directly at origin.”

Building like-minded partnerships is exactly how Bridge City ended up opening a roastery in Waco, Texas. Ward and Iluzada knew each other in college, then reconnected years later when Iluzada was working in athletics at Baylor University in Waco. He’d become fascinated with specialty coffee and started sharing his experiences on Instagram. Ward saw the posts and reached out, and the two eventually decided to team up and open a Bridge City roastery in Waco. And while they agree that Waco is strategically placed for specialty coffee, culturally and geographically, it wasn’t the location that made it an ideal fit.

“The most important aspect in it all was that we were really like-minded,” says Iluzada. “We had the same vision of loving people, caring for people, giving dignity to people, and I was already doing that in my own vocation … [and] engaging in nonprofit organizations here.”

Ward is adamant about continuing that model for expansion. “We will not expand without someone who has established community relationships,” he says, “because that’s so important to us.”

Ward is quick to point out that an operation like Bridge City does not succeed without support from like-minded investors. In fact, he says, he told his investors upfront, “If it comes down to giving you a return or giving my employees raises, I will choose giving my employees raises.” The investors who signed on, he says, “align with that statement and are in full support of that mindset.”

Excellence Without Oppression

Ward created Bridge City as a for-profit business to ensure the model would be sustainable financially, but also to show that success in business doesn’t have to come at the expense of anyone involved in the supply chain.

“We really love having a great product that does care for everyone involved, from the farmer to whoever’s drinking the cup of coffee, so we can be an example that shows you don’t have an excuse to not care for your people along the way,” says Matt Myers, director of Greenville operations. “Excellence never needs to happen at the cost of a person.”

With roasteries in South Carolina and Texas, quality and consistency depend on strong communication and the right tools. Both roasteries use Diedrich IR-12 roasters and share profiles on Cropster. “I talk with Brandon every week,” says Iluzada of his relationship with lead roaster Brandon Nelson, who roasts in South Carolina. “We talk about roast profiles and why did you do this, or can we do this better? And I can physically go into Cropster and look at what he did, where he changed the gas, where he changed the airflow.”

After Nelson and Iluzada develop sample roasts, they invite any employees who are interested to participate in cuppings and provide feedback. “We make cupping simple for everyone because the practice can be intimidating,” says Nelson.

“The cupping table is a place for all of our employees,” agrees Iluzada. “It’s not just for the professionals. It’s not just for people who have been on staff for five years. You don’t have to have Q grader status. You can just have a willingness to participate in coffee. The idea goes back to our core value that we have a growth mentality. We want to position our employees in a place where they’re learning, they feel like their voice can be heard, and they have an opportunity to be at the table.”

That spirit of inclusivity is especially important to Nelson, as “a roaster who is not only Black but also autistic,” he says. “Creativity is more of my language, rather than my words, and I have the privilege of belonging, seeking authenticity, and it’s respected.”

Embracing Healthy Conflict

For a company that focuses so heavily on supporting entry-level employees, it might be surprising that a key element of its culture involves conflict. But conflict is an unavoidable part of life, and one that most Bridge City employees are all too familiar with. What they’re not familiar with, before joining Bridge City, is how to embrace conflict while also building trust and mutual respect.

“I view conflict, healthy conflict, in a way that it’s engaging the inevitable before it catastrophizes,” says Ward. “You have the choice to engage it on your own terms and have it be a win-win, positive, constructive situation rather than destructive. … It’s not who’s right. It’s trying to see through the other person’s eyes and engaging together to come to a common end goal, rather than being at odds against each other.”

When it comes to conflict between staff, the leadership team tries to take a hands-off—though still supportive—approach. When a staff member brings an issue to their supervisor, the supervisor encourages them to talk directly with the other person involved. They’ll often help the employee role play possible ways to approach the conversation. Then they’ll let the employee know they’ll get engaged if that first attempt doesn’t resolve the issue.

“I’ve never been brought in for a second conversation,” says Tori DiMuzio, flagship manager and coffee industry event coordinator. She also encourages staff to be authentic. “Always continue to be your unique self and don’t ever pretend. Don’t ever be fake,” she says. “Don’t ever say something you don’t mean.”

Engaging in healthy conflict plays out between leadership and staff, too. Ward and Clark recall a conflict they had in the early days of covid-19 that turned out to be something of an epiphany for Clark.

“Coming here was the first time I could argue with people and then know, absolutely certainly, that they weren’t going to think less of me or hate me for that disagreement,” he says. “That specific instance was a very notable one, because for me, personally, it was probably the first real conflict I had with somebody that wasn’t a family member, that actually ended up not being conflagrating and destructive. It was a huge thing for me.”

Another key element of Bridge City’s culture is a genuine and not at all ironic focus on love.

“Bridge City was the first place I came to where the idea of love was very, very real and very active,” says Clark. “That oftentimes means going through the hard stuff, dealing with that conflict, having difficult situations and dealing with them, and absolutely doing everything we can to come out the other end, because that is what it means to truly love people, to care about them, to care about their values simply because they’re valuable.”

“My first experience of being loved was here,” agrees Lewis, “and I was not used to that. In my past experiences, hate was the response of conflict and situations toward people or toward things we don’t like. So, coming here to experience love, I had no choice but to respond to that.”

And while some members of the Bridge City team connect that love with spirituality, Ward says he purposefully designed the company to not have a religious connection.

“I have my personal beliefs, and a lot of that is foundational to the organization,” he says, “but I extremely intentionally built it in a way that no one would feel that they had to be a certain way, or if they have differing views that they would feel ostracized.”

For Bridge City’s employees, many of whom have had negative experiences in the past with work, life, and/or interpersonal conflict, the support, patience and genuine caring they find at Bridge City is a life changer. “All the times I wanted to run, all the times I wanted to shut down, all the times I wanted to just be like, you know what, I can’t do this, it was love that pulled me back,” says Lewis. “It just slowly develops. It plants a seed and then the seed begins to grow.”

* * *

Emily Puro is a freelance writer and editor living in Portland, Oregon. In addition to Roast, her articles and essays have appeared in Writer’s Digest, Better Homes and Gardens, Portland Monthly, The Oregonian and numerous other publications. She enjoys learning about the art and science of coffee, as well as the social and environmental impacts of the industry, and she continues to be amazed by those devoting their lives to this work.

Advertisement

By Emily Puro

In the early 2000s , Colby Barr and Ryan O’Donovan—founders of Verve Coffee Roasters, Roast’s 2024 Macro Roaster of the Year—were fascinated by the changes they saw happening in the specialty coffee industry. The “third wave” focus on sourcing and thoughtfully roasting exceptional coffee, centering sustainability at home and at origin, and cultivating deep and mutually beneficial relationships with producers was something they wanted to be part of.

Barr was part-owner of a locally owned coffee shop in Chico, California, and O’Donovan had worked as a barista at a sister shop, then later gained experience in roasting, green coffee sourcing, wholesale, training, grocery demos and more at Portland Roasting Coffee (now Portland Coffee Roasters) in Portland, Oregon. The two had known each other in college in Chico, and when they reconnected years later, they bonded over the exciting transformation happening in the industry. They scoped out several Bay Area locations before landing in Santa Cruz, where they began to build their empire.

“It was really a passion of mine to be in the [Santa Cruz] area, just for the beauty and the surfing and whatnot,” O’Donovan says. “We moved here in 2006 and opened Nov. 19, 2007.”

Building Relationships at Origin

Since the beginning, Verve has focused on working directly with producers whenever possible. “When Ryan and I started this, direct trade was being formed and … all of our peers were out there doing it,” says Barr. They looked to the early pioneers of direct trade to figure out what coffee sourcing meant, “and apparently it meant you just travel around the world a lot and go meet people,” he adds. “So we started doing that really early with no clue. … I can tell you firsthand, we were winging it hard but we were getting after it, and we were becoming successful.”

Travel is still a key part of the Verve green buying process, along with newer ways of connecting with producers, such as WhatsApp. The company also works hard to connect farmers with each other so they can learn and problem solve together. In 2013, as he traveled from country to country witnessing the effects of coffee leaf rust in different parts of the world, Barr realized it would be incredibly helpful to get farmers from different countries together to learn from each other and share best practices. From that seed of an idea, Verve’s global Farmlevel Summit was born.

The first summit was held at the company’s roastery in Los Angeles in 2019. The second summit was held in 2022 after the peak of the covid-19 pandemic. Because the Verve sourcing model typically involves having a key partner in each country, usually a producer who also exports coffee—something of an ambassador, says Barr—the company brought its key partners from all over Latin America to Los Angeles to share their knowledge and experience. The team hopes to invite its partners from Africa to future summits as well.

Before each summit, Verve surveys its partners to ask what topics they’d most like to discuss, and to make sure they are all on board with sharing their experiences and knowledge with other producers. “The idea is that everyone is in different countries, so it’s kind of pre-competitive, and because we’re all part of the Verve thing, we have a lot of mutual respect,” Barr explains. Discussion topics have included everything from covid-19 to pricing, inflation, currency exchange, fertilizer techniques, labor issues, cultivars, processing techniques and beyond.

And the sharing doesn’t end when the summit ends. Verve created a WhatsApp group for participants of the first summit in 2019, which proved invaluable during covid-19 as producers could continue to connect with their peers around the globe to find out what was happening and how others were handling the unprecedented challenges the pandemic raised.

Helping Producers Grow

Another major Verve initiative—The Nursery Project—came out of the desire to design a program that could drive meaningful change at origin, and that could be successful anywhere coffee is grown.

“When ideating on how Verve can help make an impact on the coffee industry as a whole, we thought to ourselves, ‘We need to set up a system that can work in any region, whether it’s Costa Rica, Colombia or anywhere else where coffee is a primary source of income,’” says Barr. “Our main goal was to do what we could without changing the farmer’s day-to-day approach to coffee growing, all while still addressing the many challenges—such as climate change, labor shortages and supply chain issues—they face regularly.”

Leveraging an existing relationship at origin, Verve rolled out its first Nursery Project in 2019. An exporting partner in Colombia had access to the land and labor required to set up and manage a coffee nursery, so Verve provided the funding to get the project off the ground. The result was 60,000 Caturra Chiroso seedlings distributed to 23 coffee producers in northern Colombia. (Caturra Chiroso is native to the area and is known for its high yield and cup scores.) The farmers received the seedlings at no cost, with the understanding that Verve would be given first opportunity to purchase any resulting yields.

“Many of the farmers who received seedlings actually used them to help their children develop their own farms,” Barr notes. “It was an unplanned but incredible twist to the program, and a way to create an opportunity for the next generation of coffee producers.”

The first harvest resulted in 1,775 pounds of green coffee. (One of those coffees was among the three samples the company sent to be judged as part of the Roaster of the Year competition.) Ten percent of sales from Nursery Project coffees support future nurseries. The goal was to create a new nursery in a different country every year, though covid-19 once again put those plans on hold. Verve plans to resume the project with a nursery in Honduras in the coming season.

To be clear, Barr is quick to point out that it’s not charity, and it’s not a guaranteed win for the farmers. “At the end of the day, this is farming and it’s tough,” he says. “For us, it’s all about partnerships. … We can extend this part, but you’re the farmer. You’ve got to go grow this. They know what it means to plant coffee.” About half of the Colombian growers who received seedlings from the project were able to successfully grow and harvest the coffee.

While Verve maintains close ties with its producer partners and has at times provided direct support for projects at origin, the main way the company supports farmers is by paying above market value for great coffee. Barr, who grew up in a farming family in northern California, says, “Ask any farmer on Earth what’s the one thing you can do to help them, and the answer every time is, ‘Pay me more.’”

To maximize its impact, Verve proudly partners with farmers doing innovative work on their farms and in their communities. Among those partners are Luis Pedro Zelaya, who has implemented regenerative farming practices on his farms in Guatemala; Arturo Paz, who added a water tank to collect water from a natural spring for his farm and, if needed, a nearby town; Valentina Duque, who works on sustainability projects across Colombia, including building parabolic dryers and sending young producers to earn Q certification from the Coffee Quality Institute; Ricardo Perez, who created the first carbon-neutral micro-mill in Costa Rica; and many more. And when the company’s longtime producer partner Amado Fernandez recently passed away, Verve honored his memory by helping to fund his lifelong dream to build a home for his family on their farm.

Innovations in Sustainability

Verve actively acknowledges that every aspect of its business has an impact on the environment, and the company makes a concerted effort to ensure that impact is positive. That focus informs processes and innovations in every department. For example, Verve intentionally located its Santa Cruz roastery within 75 miles of its annex and shipping port to reduce its carbon footprint, gaining further reductions by sending only full truckloads from the annex to the roastery. In 2020, Verve installed solar panels at its Santa Cruz headquarters and roasting facility, which has offset 424,000 pounds of carbon emissions, according to analytics provided by the vendor, Sandbar Solar.

The list goes on and on. In 2016, the company began a multi-phase installation of eco-friendly one-to-one reverse osmosis water filters at its Santa Cruz site, with the goal of ultimately installing them in all locations. And in 2023, Verve eliminated paper for all internal communications.

Recycling and composting are also among the company’s top priorities. Verve has updated its ready-to-drink (RTD) packaging and shipping materials to make sure they are reusable, compostable, or at the very least curbside recyclable. It also developed a new curbside recyclable RTD can with no plastic sleeve, which will launch in 2024. The company composts more than 200 pounds of chaff per week, donating more than half to the community for mulch and fertilizer, and it recycles burlap bags and reuses plastic bags from green coffee samples. In addition, Verve uses compostable service ware in its Santa Cruz cafes, where it’s required by local ordinance, and is working to expand the program to all of its retail locations. The company also makes sure its supply and merchandise vendors have transparent sourcing practices

Perhaps even more important than composting and recycling, however, is waste reduction. Verve reduced its RTD product loss by 65 percent over the past three years by implementing a number of innovations, and it uses a non-consumable formula engineered to closely replicate the texture of milk for barista training. In addition, baristas receive training on inventory management and waste reduction for milk dosing.

Clearly, every effort is made to optimize sustainability through small steps and giant leaps, and Verve maintains its focus on continuous improvement. It’s currently part of a pilot program with Gaeastar to introduce the San Francisco-based company’s 3D-printed compostable clay cups into its shops. “It’s a zero-waste cup,” says Katie Kelso, head of marketing and PR for Verve. “It comes from the Earth and can go back to the Earth, completely compostable.”

Gaeastar is still fine-tuning the program, but the goal is to test the cups in some of Verve’s cafes soon, and eventually to have 3D printers in all of its cafes for on-demand printing. The company likely will have collection boxes in its cafes, but collecting the material isn’t necessary, says Kelso. “It doesn’t require the usual oxygenation and churning because it’s made of clay from the Earth,” she explains. “You can literally just throw it in your garden.”

The Team is the Culture

As Verve has grown, the leadership team has kept a steady eye on maintaining the brand’s culture and identity, which means training staff on what makes Verve special, and providing benefits to ensure staff feel valued and engaged.

“The team is everything and the team is the culture,” says Barr, “so we’ve always put a ton of energy into hiring and new hire orientation and education. … The point is getting great people on the team and then trying to really communicate why we’re here and what we’re all doing.” The company has a dedicated training team that oversees all corporate, cafe and wholesale training programs, including new hire orientation, coffee education, harassment prevention, compliance, and management and leadership training—including a manager-in-training program to promote internal growth. Baristas complete technical training in extraction, brewing fundamentals, latte art, espresso, and equipment maintenance. The production and RTD teams complete safety trainings and refreshers regularly, and Verve recently launched a new production setup and related trainings to improve employee ergonomics.

“The idea at a high level is, we want to bring the right people on and have them be excited to be part of Verve,” says Barr, “give them the tools they need to really be successful and confident, and then create a lot of micro-opportunities along the way for additional education and professional development.”

The company offers a comprehensive array of employee benefits as well, including health care, vision and dental coverage; paid time off for full-time staff; competitive living wages; free coffee and discounts; an employee engagement fund for monthly team activities; and more. In addition, all employees are welcome to participate in every cupping and coffee-related class the company offers.

A Mindful Approach to Growth

Currently, Verve has roasteries in Santa Cruz, Southern California and Japan, with retail shops in Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area—including some high-profile Silicon Valley tech campuses, such as Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—and Japan. But at every stage, it was relationships that guided expansion.

After gaining traction in Santa Cruz, says Barr, the next logical step would have been to open a location “over the hill” in San Jose or Los Gatos, California. Instead, after developing a successful relationship with a restaurant group that supplies some of the top restaurants in Los Angeles, the team decided to take its first steps toward expansion there. “Los Angeles is actually one of the most interesting cities in America,” says Barr. “It’s super complex and quilted. They say it’s a city of 1,000 villages, and it’s true.”

Through its partnerships with those top Los Angeles restaurants, Verve gained the attention of Japanese developers looking for a West Coast coffee roaster to anchor the newly redesigned Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, which holds the Guinness World Record for being the busiest train station on the planet. The developers brought the Verve team to Japan to see the site, and they fell in love with Tokyo.

“It would have made more sense for us to go east, like to New York,” says Barr, “but instead we went further west. We were kind of joking, you know, keep going west, and we ended up in Japan and it’s amazing.”

The company has grown its product lines over the years as well. In addition to whole-bean coffee, Verve offers craft instant and an extensive RTD line of a flash-brewed canned coffee drinks (brewed hot to extract the same flavors as a pour-over, then canned and intended to be served cold). Verve’s RTD oat milk lattes feature house-made oat milk and come in original, mocha and honey lavender. The company is set to launch a new formulation of the lattes in 2024 without any gums, oils or refined sugars.

“We have some other product lines we’re going to be launching soon,” says Barr, “but I don’t know that we’re ready to talk about them yet, and a couple other product innovations we’re working on that will be launching in the next year.”

As the company grows, it continues to refine its roasting processes to maintain product quality and consistency. “We have our roastery here in Santa Cruz and we also have our roastery in Japan,” says Matt Tilley, head of coffee, “and as we’re expanding, we’ve started to do some roasting down in Oxnard [California] as well. So as our team’s getting bigger and our locations are expanding, we’re looking at more ways to sustain that growth.” That’s mainly achieved through ongoing communication between sites, and the fact that they all roast on the same model Loring roasters and track every roast in Cropster.

“Everything that we roast that has our name on it, we make sure that it’s tracking on all our graphs that are centralized in Cropster,” Tilley explains. “We make sure that everything is in alignment from the original profile that we set at HQ, and that the weight loss is recorded, the color scores are tracked, our in-between batch protocols are being met, so there’s just a real clean uniformity across all locations. Expansion is super exciting, and it’s something we all want, but we obviously don’t want to lose the essence and the reason we were able to expand, which is our quality, so we really make sure that’s at the forefront.”

The next step in Verve’s expansion will be a larger Safe Quality Food (SQF)-certified roasting facility on the East Coast. “Our Oxnard facility was necessary for some of the SQF customer requests we’ve been getting as we grow,” says Jeff Woods, chief growth officer for Verve. “We realize that is going to be a key component for a lot of the people we’re working with, and a lot of our growth is on the East Coast, so we have been looking for another, larger SQF facility out there.” That facility is slated to be online within the next 18 months or so, and is driving the development of more formalized processes and procedures for the roasting team. “As we look at expanding out that way,” Woods says, “we’ve had to set up new standard operating procedures and protocols internally on the West Coast to be able to start mirroring that and preparing for that as we move to that East Coast expansion.”

Verve’s leadership team is proud of all the company has achieved, from expanding its roasting and retail operations nationally and internationally to developing new and innovative lines of instant and RTD coffees. It’s also proud of the support it’s been able to provide to growers and employees, and the relationships it’s built with wholesale and retail partners. “We’re on a ramp-up with Whole Foods, which we feel is perfect brand alignment for us,” says Barr, “and we’re nationwide with REI with our instant, which we feel is amazing.”

But even with its dynamic growth model and global success, Verve maintains its focus on the company’s core values. “Growth and making a real impact take time, so we’ve always been more focused on a slow, steady and thoughtful approach,” Barr says. “At the end of the day, our goal is to make great coffee approachable for everyone, and to make sure that as a community, from our farmers to our shops, we have a system in place that can sustain our mission.”

* * *

Emily Puro is a freelance writer and editor living in Portland, Oregon. In addition to Roast, her articles and essays have appeared in Writer’s Digest, Better Homes and Gardens, Portland Monthly, The Oregonian and numerous other publications. She enjoys learning about the art and science of coffee, as well as the social and environmental impacts of the industry, and she continues to be amazed by those devoting their lives to this work.

Advertisement

Bridge City Coffee and Verve Coffee Roasters

PORTLAND, OREGON (Oct. 18, 2023) — Bridge City Coffee and Verve Coffee Roasters have won Roast magazine’s 20th annual Roaster of the Year award in the Micro and Macro roaster categories, respectively. The two coffee roasting companies will be featured in the trade publication’s November/December 2023 issue. 

Roast awards top honors in two categories: Micro Roaster of the Year, for companies roasting fewer than 100,000 pounds of coffee each year; and Macro Roaster of the Year, for companies roasting more than 100,000 pounds annually. The award recognizes companies that roast coffees of superior quality, exemplify a dedication to sustainability, promote employee and community education, and demonstrate a strong commitment to diversity, inclusion and equity, among other criteria. 

Bridge City Coffee was founded in 2017 by owner Gregory Ward. With 42 full-time and part-time employees, the company has a roasting facility and three retail cafes in the Greenville, South Carolina, area, as well as roasting operations in Waco, Texas. Between the two locations, Bridge City roasted over 32,000 pounds of coffee in the past year. Learn more at bridgecity.coffee.

Verve Coffee Roasters was founded in 2007 by Colby Barr and Ryan O’Donovan in Santa Cruz, California. With over 260 full-time and part-time employees, the company operates roasting facilities and 19 retail locations, across Northern California, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, Japan. Verve has roasted 1.5 million pounds of coffee in the past year. Learn more at vervecoffee.com.

In addition to Bridge City Coffee, finalists for the Micro Roaster category were Dear Green Coffee Roasters and Three Keys Coffee. Along with Verve Coffee Roasters, finalists for the Macro Roaster category were Nossa Familia Coffee and Groundwork Coffee. Congratulations to all of the finalists for making incredible commitments to the industry, employees, partners across the value stream, and within local neighborhoods.

About Roast Magazine

Roast magazine is a bi-monthly technical trade journal dedicated to the success and growth of the specialty coffee industry. Roast addresses the art, science and business of coffee roasters by covering the issues most important to them, with quality editorial content focused on the technical aspects of coffee. For more information, visit roastmagazine.com.

Advertisements

Welcome to Roast Podcast.

In this episode, Roast publisher Connie Blumhardt talks with author Kat Melheim about the article "Balancing Efficiency and Quality: Identifying the Optimal Batch Size for Your Roast" from Issue 119: September | October 2023. Read the article here.

With Roast Podcast, listen at your own convenience and keep up with the latest research, knowledge and insights from scientists, subject matter experts and professionals from across the industry.

Listen to Roast Podcast on:
SoundCloud | Apple Podcasts | Spotify

Excerpt From the Article

“Many variables go into creating  the  perfect roast profile—equipment, the green beans, charge temperature, development time and more. One variable often overlooked is batch size. Batch size is just as it sounds—the size of the batch of coffee you are roasting, or how many pounds (or kilos) of green coffee you load into your roasting machine at a time. Roasting machines come in various sizes, and they are typically named to reflect drum capacity, or maximum batch size. …

However, the stated capacity for each roasting machine is not necessarily the ideal batch size for a particular offering. Other considerations come into play—your daily roasting needs, your machine’s heat source and power supply, green coffee density and other factors.”

Advertisement

Grab Your Spot for the 2024 Roast Summit!

Join us at this exclusive gathering of coffee roasting professionals. Set against the backdrop of beautiful Portland, Oregon, the two-day event promises to be an unforgettable experience. On February 22-23, 2024, we will convene at two remarkable venues: the historic McMenamins Kennedy School and the innovative Buckman Coffee Factory. Discover the latest trends, insights and techniques in the world of coffee roasting, while networking with industry leaders and fellow coffee lovers! Registration will open soon.

Advertisement

Permalink

]]>Registration is Now Open for Roast Summit 2024—Coming to Portland, Oregon, this FebruaryReadLily KubotaThu, 24 Aug 2023 23:07:08 +0000https://www.roastmagazine.com/stories/balancing-efficiency-and-quality6176daf1156c8f7ecda2607f:6176daf5156c8f7ecda260cc:64e7e29c6988676df0d17d69← Issue 119: September | October 2023

By Kat Melheim

Many variables go into creating  the  perfect roast profile—equipment, the green beans, charge temperature, development time and more. One variable often overlooked is batch size. Batch size is just as it sounds—the size of the batch of coffee you are roasting, or how many pounds (or kilos) of green coffee you load into your roasting machine at a time. Roasting machines come in various sizes, and they are typically named to reflect drum capacity, or maximum batch size. For example, Loring’s S15 Falcon is a 15-kilo roaster, Diedrich’s IR-12 has a capacity of 12 kilograms, the SF-75 is San Franciscan’s 75-pound/35-kilo machine, and Mill City’s machines are all labeled with the drum size in the name. Most roasting machine manufacturers follow this naming convention with at least some of their popular models.

However, the stated capacity for each roasting machine is not necessarily the ideal batch size for a particular offering. Other considerations come into play—your daily roasting needs, your machine’s heat source and power supply, green coffee density and other factors. In this article, we will explore these considerations and gain insight from roaster consultants, working roasters and machine manufacturers. The goal is to equip you, fellow roaster, with the knowledge, tools and skills you need to determine your batch sizes in the most efficient, effective way possible.

Conventional Wisdom

You may have heard a few numbers thrown around suggesting relative minimum and maximum batch sizes. Maximum batch capacity is generally suggested to be 80 percent of the drum capacity. So, a 5-kilo roaster should be loaded with 4 kilos of coffee at the max. Minimum batch capacity is more disputed. I have heard 20 percent, 25 percent, or even 40 percent as recommended minimum batch sizes. But where do we get these numbers? And do these parameters always produce the best results? Conventional wisdom can provide a good starting point, but practical experience provides an important complement.

Practical Application

Coffee roasting consultant Anne Cooper says, “I have always traditionally worked on the ‘25 percent of the rated drum size is the ideal minimum batch size’ and ‘80 percent of the rated drum size is the ideal maximum batch size’—in theory.” However, Cooper notes that she doesn’t always stick to these theoretical recommendations in practice. “If a machine has the heat transfer abilities and is managed properly, then it is very capable of doing full size batches. I do full-size batches all the time, but it does tremendously depend on the desired roast profile/cooking strategy.”

Cooper isn’t alone in suggesting that you should start with your desired roast profile and find a batch size that allows you to achieve it. Shelby Williamson, head roaster at Huckleberry Roasters in Denver, does this as well. “For me, batch size itself is arbitrary,” she says. “All of these numbers are arbitrary, so we need to talk about what’s actually going on when we’re making these changes. I have a certain style of roasting that I like to adhere to for most of my coffees. Typically, my single origins are between 8 and 10 minutes [roasting time]. And then we have coffees that are for blenders, they’re a little darker, they’re meant for espresso. Those are more in the 10- to 13-minute range. That’s just my style of roasting. So, when I’m choosing batch sizes, typically I’ll choose them so that I can adhere to the time limits that I have set for myself.”

Cameron Heath, the environmental health and safety manager at Counter Culture Coffee, based in Durham, North Carolina, takes a practical approach: “We have a 90-kilo machine and we put in roughly 195 pounds [88.5 kilos] just for efficiency’s sake, and you can still manipulate that well.” He mentions that for Counter Culture, getting more coffee through the roasters is crucial to keep up with required production volume. “You’re relying more on good sourcing practices and longstanding relationships,” he says. “You have good quality coffee. That way you don’t have to mask any kind of imperfection [with roasting].” Heath’s objective is pushing out the most coffee he can, so he uses the heaviest batches that his machines can handle to accomplish the goal of volume.

Based on the principles of heat transfer, author and coffee roasting consultant Scott Rao has a mathematical method to determine maximum batch size a roaster should consider in any given drum roaster. Through years of observation and cross-referencing a more controlled study, Rao devised a calculation that uses a machine’s burner output. He explains the formula as, “5,000 BTUs per hour burner capacity gives you the capacity to roast about a pound of green per batch. It’s a very fuzzy calculation, because I’m making an assumption of, let’s say, like a 12-minute roast. In the metric system, that’s about 11,600 kilojoules per hour per kilogram of green.” Note, this calculation is applicable to traditional drum roasters such as Probat, Diedrich and San Franciscan, but not to fluid-bed or air roasters such as Loring or IMF. It is also important to remember that this calculation is a starting point, not a hard and fast rule. “I think of that calculation as telling you the largest batch size you should consider, but not necessarily the optimal batch size,” he says. It is still important to observe how your roasts are going and adjust as needed to hit your goals.

In addition to Rao, a number of professionals I spoke with mentioned the difference between traditional drum (single-pass-through roasters) versus fluid-bed (recirculating machines). Firstly, fluid-bed or air roasters, which primarily use convection (hot air) as the heat source, can often handle larger batches in less time. These machines lose less heat because they recirculate hot air through the machine and drum rather than pushing it all out through the chimney, thus preserving more heat within the roasting system. Many of the roasters I spoke with also mentioned that air roasters may produce fewer physical roasting defects such as tipping, scorching and facing because the drum surface in those machines often does not get as hot as in single-walled traditional drum roasters.

Fixed Versus Variable Batch Sizes: Maximizing Efficiency, Consistency and Quality

Whether you set out to create a 10-minute roast profile  or to push 1,000 pounds through your machine per day, batch size is a critical variable in achieving your roasting goals. You can conceive of batch size in two ways: fixed or variable. As a real-world roaster, you must balance best practices with practical considerations and do what is best for your operation.

• Fixed Batch Size: With a fixed batch size, a roaster will use the same batch size roast after roast. You can use one batch size for all coffees (i.e., always roasting 4 kilos in a 5-kilo machine). Or you can keep a consistent batch size for each coffee but use different batch sizes for different coffees (for example, always roasting Colombian coffees in 10-kilo batches, Ethiopian coffees in 11-kilo batches, etc.). Using a fixed batch size helps maintain consistency, limits roasting variables, and allows the roaster to tweak other aspects of the roast. The main downside is that you might end up with overage (i.e., roast more coffee than you need). If you get an order for 2 kilos of a coffee but your batch size is set to 4 kilos, you will end up with twice as much coffee as you need. If you have an outlet for this coffee, this is no problem. At Huckleberry, Williamson mentioned a “Coffee Club” where the company sells its overage at a discount to subscribed customers. Some roasters will create blends from their extra coffee, donate it to local food pantries, or give it to friends and family. However, if you run tight margins or can’t find a way to offload extra roasted coffee, you could end up with excess that takes a toll on your bottom line.

• Variable Batch Size: Some roasters determine batch size based on their roasted coffee needs. Andy Sprenger, founder of Sweet Bloom Coffee Roasters in Lakewood, Colorado, says he starts with a baseline batch range that the company has determined for each of its machines (40 to 45 pounds in a 75-pound San Franciscan and 45 to 55 pounds for a Loring 35-kilo) and adjusting from there. “We aim for every roast to fall inside the optimal batch range, and since we roast to order, this can be challenging,” Sprenger says. “But we can tweak batch sizes by roasting extra for the following day and use our own cafes for overages.” Varying your batch size allows for more control over how much roasted coffee you will end up with. However, changing the batch size affects everything else about roasting, so other adjustments will be required to achieve consistent roasting results.

Scaling Production: How to Upsize/Downsize Your Batch

When changing batch size, certain adjustments must be made to compensate for the difference in weight. A larger batch requires more energy to roast than a smaller batch of the same coffee. This can be done through a variety of means:

• Higher charge temperature. Cooper recommends adjusting the charge temperature by 10 degrees C [18 degrees F] for every 1 kilo [2.2 pounds]. But be careful not to heat the drum too much (especially in a single-walled drum roaster) or you run the risk of scorching/facing.

• Higher burner settings throughout the roast, so more heat is added to the system overall.

• A shorter “soak” period (i.e., time without heat at the beginning of the roast), so you are adding heat earlier.

• A slower roast overall, so the coffee spends more time in contact with heat.

• Using a transitional between-batch protocol to increase the thermal mass within the roaster when going from a smaller to larger batch.

All these adjustments can be made in reverse when going from a bigger to smaller batch size.

After scaling your batch size up or down and making the subsequent adjustments, how can you tell if your coffee is roasting consistently? Pay attention to the timing. Cooper says, “Sometimes on the Probat [P12], I would do a 4-kilo batch size to test a coffee and then batch-up to a full 12-kilo batch size. The only area of compromise I have is the time to yellow, maybe a 30-second difference, but after yellow everything—time in Maillard, first crack time, development time and development degrees post first crack—has to be exactly the same, along with the end roast color. As long as the cooking strategy/time is the same from yellow onwards, then the flavors will taste similar or, ideally, the same.”

Williamson echoes this focus on time, pointing out that probes and temperature readings can be misleading at drastically different batch sizes. Talking about going from a full batch to a half batch, she says, “When you have that dramatic of a difference in weight, the probes are going to read a little bit differently. I might finish at 440 degrees F (227 degrees C) for our darker coffee in the full batch. It might be 435 degrees F (224 degrees C) in the half batch. I use a combo of trying to hit the same markers of hitting yellowing around the same time, hitting first crack around the same time and visually checking the coffee as it comes out.”

And of course, taste your coffee. Sensory analysis via brewing is the ultimate test of whether you are successfully roasting consistently.

The Risks of Big Batches

Big batch roasting can allow you to roast more coffee in less time, but there are also risks involved.

• Roast defects. Defects such as facing, tipping and scorching can occur from an overloaded single-walled traditional drum roaster because the beans spend more time pressed up against the hot metal surface. Nearly all the professionals I spoke with mentioned this, and many noted that it is more common for natural- and honey-processed coffees, as they tend to be less dense and more prone to heat damage.

• Uneven development in the cup. The increase in convective heat of a big batch can cause the outside of the bean to roast more quickly than the inside of the bean, meaning the surface will get darker while the inside remains underdeveloped. Sprenger notes, “If we push above our optimal batch size range, the off flavors we get are a more one-dimensional, slightly underdeveloped roasts. Baking is another potential downfall.”

• Damage to the machine itself. Cooper mentions that exposing the roaster to the excessive heat required to roast an overloaded batch can dry out the grease within the bearings of the machine. If you are not regularly checking and maintaining these bearings, they can fail more frequently, leading to inconvenient and costly repairs.

• Potential fire hazards. Some roasters might be concerned that an overfilled roaster could lead to a roaster fire. However, batch size alone won’t cause a roaster fire. “Fires are directly related to the temperature of the bean, so if you get the bean to a combustible temperature, it doesn’t matter what the batch size is,” says Bill Kennedy of San Franciscan Roaster Company. “But I will say, the more fuel you have, the bigger the fire.” If you are roasting dark, keep an eye out for fires. Also be aware of your chaff levels, because bigger batch sizes do lead to more chaff build-up, and chaff is highly flammable.

Problems With Small Batches

Smaller batch roasting often gives you more control over a roast, but if you go too small you run the risk of compromising repeatability and losing control completely. When roasting smaller batches, you need to make sure the thermocouple or bean temperature probe is fully immersed in the bean mass, otherwise the reading will be incorrect and misleading. The risk is, if your coffee comes out tasting great, this profile will be nearly impossible to replicate.

Another thing to consider is your machine’s construction. Williamson says that when trying to match profiles on Huckleberry’s 15-kilo Giesen, if she tries to roast less than 5 pounds, she has to turn down the burner and the airflow significantly, but “if you lower the airflow too much,” she notes, “the flame doesn’t have enough oxygen, so it just snuffs.” You are then left with no heat source, and you can’t roast coffee without heat.

Experiments to Try in the Roastery

Maybe you are happy with your current batch size and you want to stick with it. Great! Or maybe you are curious to try something new. Here are a few trials to find out more about how your machine handles different batch sizes.

1. Load your machine to the stated capacity. If you have the green to spare, load your machine to its “full” capacity and let it rip. Is your machine able to keep up with your desired curve, or does it fall significantly behind and the roast takes twice as long as you intended? Either way, make sure you taste the coffee to assess the results where it matters most—your palate.

2. Add a pound or two to a roast profile you want to slow down. Williamson says she uses batch size as a variable in stretching out a roast. “Sometimes when I have a profile that I’m like, ‘I really love this profile, but I wish I could slow it down,’ rather than trying to force it through the airflow and the gas, what I’ll do is I’ll add a pound to the batch size.” She then makes gas and air adjustments at the same temperatures as she would with the regular batch size and observes what happens.

3. Increase convective heat transfer by reducing your batch size. Fewer beans means more air space. “If you have coffee to play around with, it would be worth playing,” says Heath. “You could, say, under-batch by a certain percentage and see if more convective heating will brighten up a coffee, clean up a coffee.” Adjusting batch size can change the proportions of convective (air) versus conductive (touch) heat transfer.

As with most variables in coffee roasting, there is no one perfect or universal answer. Ultimately, the batch size (or sizes) you choose should allow you to consistently roast your coffee the way you want to roast it. Whether you shoot for precision control, cranking out high volumes, or producing lightning fast roasts, batch size is one variable that you can manipulate to achieve your roasting goals.

* * *

Kat Melheim is a roaster, barista, writer and artist. She founded Coffee People Zine, an art and coffee publication, and can be found on Instagram @roasterkat where she posts roastery behind-the-scenes and educational content. Through all her work, Melheim strives to entertain, educate, and ultimately connect people to one another.

Advertisement

By Silke Fuchshofen

Long-anticipated changes to the National Organic Program (NOP) went into effect on March 20, 2023, expanding the oversight and enforcement of the production, handling and sale of organic products. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Strengthening Organic Enforcement (SOE) rule amends organic regulations to protect the integrity of the organic supply chain and improve farm-to-market traceability. The changes seek to provide a level playing field for organic farms and businesses.

Since the USDA organic regulations went into effect in 2002, the organic market has seen tremendous growth. Consumer demand has risen, many more businesses are participating in the organic market, and supply chains have gotten increasingly complex. In 2013, organic food sales in the United States were around $31 billion. Nine years later, in 2022, they had nearly doubled to $61.7 billion. This includes roughly $2.3 billion for coffee, up by almost 7 percent from the year before.

At the same time, because the organic label fetches higher prices, the program has also attracted fraud. In the past several years it became clear that some gaps in oversight and enforcement needed to be addressed, including multiple recommendations by the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) and the implementation of provisions of the 2018 Farm Bill, which required the USDA to stipulate that all entities in the global organic supply chain become certified. The new regulations better allow identification of fraudulent organic certificates and clarify that the NOP may initiate enforcement action against any violator of the Organic Food and Production Act, including uncertified operations and responsibly connected parties.

The regulation changes affect the organic coffee industry in different ways. Most notably, as of March 19, 2024—the implementation date of the SOE rule—all sales brokers, commodity traders, importers and exporters of organic coffee will have to be certified, and exports will need to be accompanied by import certificates issued by the operation’s organic certification agency.

Organic production methods are designed to improve environmental sustainability, and consumers pay a higher price to support that—along with the proven and/or perceived health benefits. Preserving strong consumer trust in the organic label is the ultimate goal, so it is important that organic operations throughout the supply chain maintain the integrity of organic products on a day-to-day basis.

Importers, Exporters and Brand Owners

Sales brokers, commodity traders, importers, exporters and brand owners used to be excluded from the requirement of organic certification. They were able to arrange the sale and movement of certified goods by sending the producer’s organic certificate, or the certificate of the last certified entity, which could be a certified exporter, importer or other trader. The thought behind the exclusion was that entities who do not physically come in contact with the product do not have to be concerned about commingling or processing mistakes. But this rule also made it difficult for buyers of organic raw materials to know what was required, and sometimes the wrong certificates were collected. With the new SOE rule, that is changing.

The elimination of these exemptions may be the most impactful change for the U.S. organic coffee industry. In the United States, many who trade organic coffee already hold organic certification, either voluntarily, or because it has been requested by a certified organic customer. Many of these traders and brand owners knew the SOE changes were coming, but not all—and probably least prepared are exporters in producing countries who only occasionally sell organic coffee. Starting on March 19, 2024, these exporters will have to have their own USDA organic certificates, and each export will require an organic import certificate from the exporter’s organic certifier.

Customs brokers remain exempt, but companies loading and unloading goods that are not in tamper-proof packaging do need organic certification going forward. Warehouses are exempt only if they receive, maintain and ship organic material in the same unopened tamper-proof packaging or container. Are burlap bags with plastic lining considered tamper-proof? This may be one of the open questions.

Import Certificates

With the implementation of the new regulations, all exports to the United States will require an NOP import certificate. The exporter needs to request it from their certifier. The necessary information is entered into the Organic Integrity Database which generates the certificate.

The data included on the NOP import certificate must be entered into the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Automated Commercial Environment system. The importer must verify that the shipment has had no contact with prohibited substances or exposure to ionizing radiation since export. A documented organic control system must be in place to conduct this verification. Organic imports have to be identified and marked as organic on all import documents, such as invoices, packing lists, bills of lading, and CBP entry data. This import certificate procedure is one of the core elements of the new rule, intended to increase oversight and strengthen organic integrity by improving traceability to the port of entry and ensuring an auditable record trail.

Exemptions for Retailers and Roasters

Retail establishments that process organic agricultural ingredients can be exempt from the requirement of organic certification, but only if processing and point of final sale are in the same location. A roaster could be exempt and sell coffee labeled as “organic,” but not as “certified organic” with the USDA seal. This roaster would be able to sell the roasted coffee labeled “organic” only to customers at its own location or online, but not to another retail store or through other store locations. Recordkeeping requirements still apply for three years beyond their creation. Exempt operations still must be able to demonstrate organic identity and verify quantities upon request by representatives of the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

Traceability

The new regulations are more specific in terms of recordkeeping and traceability practices. Inspectors conducted trace-backs and mass balances in the past as verification tools. Now they are officially required in the regulations. (At a roasting facility, a trace-back would be similar to a mock recall but geared toward organic verification. The lot number on a finished product is used as the starting point and followed through all sales, processing and purchasing documentation to see if tracing back to the raw material purchase, supplier and supplied lot number is possible. A mass balance compares the amount of purchased raw material and the amount of finished product containing this raw material in a certain time frame. Beginning and ending inventories, the percentage of ingredient contained in the finished product and production losses are all considered in the calculation.)

As a result of the new rule, certifiers will most likely expand their organic system plan templates to better assess vulnerabilities, and all certified organic operations are encouraged to actively participate by improving traceability and contributing to strengthened organic integrity.

Nonretail Containers

Under the new regulations, nonretail containers that are used to ship or store organic products will need to be clearly labeled to show the organic identity of the coffee (e.g., “organic green coffee beans”). Before, the only domestic requirement for nonretail containers was the lot code. That seemed sufficient in the beginning but was later identified as a weakness. Going forward, the container needs to show the lot code as well as identifying the organic material. The container will need to be linkable with the audit trail documentation, and the operator needs to document how the finished product is fully traceable back to the bulk raw material. An organic inspector will verify that this requirement is fulfilled.

Inspections

The new rule states that every certified operation must be inspected not only every year but once per calendar year. This change will mainly mean that stricter administrative procedures are required from the certification agency, but it also means that you may not be able to postpone inspections that are scheduled for late in the calendar year.

The amended regulations also mandate that 5 percent of certified operations receive an unannounced inspection every year. This has been a recommendation in the past and may therefore not be a significant change, but now it is mandatory. The unannounced inspection can either be a partial inspection that focuses only on specific areas, or it can replace the usually announced annual inspection if it complies with those requirements.

Organic Certificates

Operations that have handled organic products can attest to the misconceptions around the information on organic supplier certificates. The new regulations are addressing this by standardizing organic certificates, which will be generated in the Organic Integrity Database. Only the addendum to the certificate—those pages that list products, brand names and international standards—will still be generated within the certifier’s systems. In addition, there are now instructions on what needs to be included in the addendum, and it must be clearly linkable with the standardized organic certificate.

The Organic Integrity Database

The Organic Integrity Database has been a useful resource for years, and with the SOE rule changes, it will become even more important. One can search the Organic Integrity Database (organic.ams.usda. gov/integrity) for certified commodities, certifiers by country, and to check if a supplier is listed. Should you receive an organic supplier certificate but the operation is not listed in the Organic Integrity Database, it is a good idea to inform the certifier right away as it might be a counterfeit. With the added functionality of generating all operations’ organic certificates and being the hub for import certificate data, this website will be central to the management of organic certification information.

Grower Group Certification

Another big change is that the requirements for grower group certification are now included in the regulations. Previously, the grower group certification requirements were governed by a USDA Policy Memorandum and by NOSB recommendations. This change will lead to improved clarity and will also enable better enforcement.

Producer group certification is possible if all members use the same resources and input materials; they may not purchase from outside the grower group. Members may only sell through the grower group, unless their operation has its own certification. A grower group has only one organic system plan (OSP) that is binding for all members and includes an internal control system (ICS) by which the organization can verify that its members adhere to the OSP. Part of the ICS’s responsibility is to conduct an annual inspection at each member operation. These internal inspections also need to cover trace-back and mass balance audits.

During the annual organic inspection by the group’s organic certification agency, the inspector verifies the compliance and effectiveness of the ICS by visiting the organization’s offices as well as a prescribed group of members. Each member that has been determined to be high risk, at least one member of each production unit (grower groups are often divided into subgroups that are called units), each handling facility, and at least 1.4 times the square root or 2 percent of the total number of producer group members (whichever is greater) need to be inspected. Each agency that certifies grower groups needs to conduct unannounced inspections for at least 5 percent of those groups annually.

European Union Organic Regulations

The European Union (EU) organic regulations also underwent substantial changes, and while they may not directly affect coffee trading, roasting or retail businesses in the United States, they may do so indirectly. For example, there will be stricter legal distinctions between agricultural and nonagricultural operations. Previously, exporters were able to obtain one group certification for producer and processing facilities. Now the producer group has to be its own legal entity before it can get producer-group certification, and the processing facility has to obtain its own certification.

Also, under the new EU regulations, 5 percent of producer group members must get an annual organic inspection, and a sample will need to be taken and sent to a lab for residue analysis at 2 percent of the member operations. Both are significant increases, and costs for EU certifications are expected to rise substantially. If producers decide to drop EU certification but maintain NOP certification, as some suggest as a possibility, this could mean increased availability of NOP coffee in the U.S. market.

These are only a few specifics from the EU regulations, which will have to be implemented by December 31, 2024. (In countries that have an equivalency agreement with the EU, they will need to be implemented by December 31, 2026.)

Recommendations for Roasters and Traders

In light of the new SOE and EU rules, we offer the following suggestions for U.S.-based coffee businesses who work in or are interested in working in the organic sector:

• If you run or work for a coffee trading business that works with organic coffee, you will need to obtain organic certification or discontinue trading organic coffee. If you decide to discontinue, let your trade partners know so they can make other arrangements.

• If you are a certified organic roaster and get your organic coffee from uncertified suppliers, make sure they are aware of the regulation changes. Spreading the word will help avoid disruptions in the organic coffee business.

• If you are a brand owner and contract out all manufacturing activities, you will need organic certification.

• Certified operations may want to go over their recordkeeping procedures and test if all departments, including marketing, purchasing and receiving, align with the document traceability rules. Documentation needs to be reliably connected with nonretail containers in storage.

• Change your bulk labels to include the identification “organic” along with the product name.

• Check the regulations to determine if you need organic certification for your coffee retail or warehousing operation.

• If your business is certified organic, keep an eye out for information from your organic certifier regarding the new rules and how they might affect you.

• If you determine that you need or want organic certification, start the process as soon as possible. The organic industry is expecting a significant increase in certification applications over the next several months.

This article is intended to provide an overview of the recent changes to USDA organic rules. Organic certifiers are currently in the process of implementing the new requirements and expect further guidance from the NOP. For more information about organic certification and NOP rules and regulations, visit ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/organic. If you are interested in more background information, see the Federal Register/Vol. 88, No. 12.

***

Silke Fuchshofen worked for a freight forwarding agency in Hamburg, Germany, before obtaining her BSc in agriculture. From 2009 to 2019, she conducted about 800 organic inspections for all kinds of processing and handling operations in the United States. The owner of Organic Insights, Inc., Fuchshofen conducts inspector and certifier trainings and internal audits, and provides consulting services for processing and handling operations that seek organic certification or reinstatement or want to improve their organic procedures. She can be reached at silke@organicinsights.com.

Advertisement

Welcome to Roast Magazine Audio Articles. Roast focuses on coffee from a technical perspective, covering the art, science and business of coffee roasters.

Presenting: "When Technology Fails: Strategies and Critical Skills for Coffee Roaster Operations" by Anne Cooper. This article originally appeared in Roast magazine's May/June 2023 issue. Read the article here.

This audio article was narrated by Lily Kubota, recorded and produced by Upright Recording Studio, and published by Roast magazine.

Interview With The Author

Roast Magazine publisher Connie Blumhardt sits down with Anne Cooper, the author of "When Technology Fails: Strategies and Critical Skills for Coffee Roaster Operations" from the May/June 2023 issue.

Advertisement

Roast magazine publisher Connie Blumhardt sits down with Anne Cooper, the author of "When Technology Fails: Strategies and Critical Skills for Coffee Roaster Operations" from the May/June 2023 issue (read the article or listen to the Audio Article).

Read the Article or Listen to the Audio Article

Before or after watching the interview with Anne Cooper, be sure to read the full article “When Technology Fails: Strategies and Critical Skills for Coffee Roaster Operations” or listen to the audio article version:

Advertisement

Welcome to Roast Magazine Audio Articles. Roast focuses on coffee from a technical perspective, covering the art, science and business of coffee roasters.

Presenting: "A New Tool for the Cupping Kit: The Cafe Imports Coffee Rose Offers a New Model for Sensory Evaluation" by Ian Fretheim. This article originally appeared in Roast magazine's March/April 2023 issue. Read the article here.

This audio article was narrated by Lily Kubota, recorded and produced by Upright Recording Studio, and published by Roast magazine.

Interview With The Author

Roast Magazine publisher Connie Blumhardt sits down with Ian Fretheim, the author of "A New Tool for the Cupping Kit: The Cafe Imports Coffee Rose Offers a New Model for Sensory Evaluation" from the March/April 2023 issue.

Advertisement

Roast magazine publisher Connie Blumhardt sits down with Ian Fretheim, the author of "A New Tool for the Cupping Kit: The Cafe Imports Coffee Rose Offers a New Model for Sensory Evaluation" from the March/April 2023 issue (read the article or listen to the Audio Article).

Read the Article or Listen to the Audio Article

Before or after watching the interview with Ian Fretheim, be sure to read the full article “A New Tool for the Cupping Kit: The Cafe Imports Coffee Rose Offers a New Model for Sensory Evaluation” or listen to the audio article version:

Advertisement

By Phil Beattie

There is a quiet flavor battle brewing, and the frontlines are somewhere between the coffee mug and the cupping table. In this battle, you’ll hear cries to rally folks to the strong camp, the smooth camp, or the vibrant camp. Citrus and lactic lock arms to charge headlong into milk chocolate and nougat, while bittersweet and oaky wait for their chance to make headway.

In this battle there are three camps—the coffee traditionalists, the devotees and the new wavers—all with a deep care for their cup and an axe to grind about how other coffee drinkers look at them.

The Traditionalist: Coffee has a deep history of being the strong hearty elixir that gets you going. Whether as a slammed shot of espresso or a hair-raising thick press pot, coffee serves as the smelling salts of these motivated movers and shakers. If you can’t take the sludge, feel free to add milk and sugars of all sorts, but that coffee better punch through—reminding you in the finish that this is a hearty beverage not for the faint of heart. Coffee is here to remind you it’s time to get up! And that is best done with a strong grip.

The Devotee: Knows that coffee has so much more to offer than a punch in the mouth. Coffee is your friend. Coffee is here to set the backdrop to your best conversations, not to dominate the conversation. Coffee should be respected yet approachable, available any time of day, bringing balance and warmth to both mug and mind. Just chill, literally—try this cold brew.

The New Waver: Sees your three waves and promptly furrows their brow. Your antiquated categories can’t contain the wildness at the heart of coffee. Your standard operating procedures and best practices won’t birth the biome of coffee’s vibrant future. Never settling for a comforting cup, coffee should scream for your attention and confront your preconceptions. You say 17 hours of fermentations? I say seven days. And please stop slurping your espresso!

And so, the stage is set and the stakes are high. We may have moved on from the task of defining “specialty coffee”—a term few outside the industry knew needed defining—but the coffee drinking public may clap back if we try to shove what we’re drinking down their collective throat. I’ve been in the industry long enough to remember the mantra of “educate the consumer,” yet all that mantra may have accomplished was to indoctrinate ourselves and alienate the consumer.

A Walk Down Memory Lane

How did we get here? The turn of the century was still dominated by the deep, dark, oily roasts—from nameless origins with claims to be able to “punch through milk” and “put hair on your chest.” A whole host of young coffee revolutionists decried these coffees as lifeless and burnt, charred, and hiding predatory supply chains behind flavors of dark chocolate and tobacco.

The way to displace these heartless coffees seemed clear: a lighter roast and traceability. Certifications complimented descriptions of elevation and region-specific coffee, with an estate or cooperative name sprinkled in here or there. Primary flavors became approachable and balanced, while clean cup and sweetness dominated the dialogue of what a “good coffee” would demonstrate in the cup. And, oh yes, cupping! Cupping became the standard, not just for detecting defects but for isolating qualities. Groups like the Roasters Guild and Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) created movements of teaching the cupping process around the globe.

Quality discovery with the goal of a more equitable supply chain—and a side of “will someone teach these people coffee is the seed of a cherry?”—had us all slurping louder, searching for the deity in the cup.

And so, the question became, how can we bring attention to these coffees, these producers, these new flavors unfolding in these more sophisticated roasts? The answer was clear: Competition.

Competitions Shape the Landscape

Since the early days of origin-focused competitions and online auctions, standing out has been the goal. On a table full of balanced, clean coffees that are all roasted to the same degree, how can a coffee grab a judge’s attention? It must pop! And nothing pops quite like a splash of fruit in a sea of browns.

I can remember being on the Colombia Cup of Excellence International Jury in 2006. As a young cupper surrounded by veterans and luminaries, I was thrilled to follow the tasting lead of my coffee buying heroes in the room. After each round of cupping, we would gather to regroup and discuss what we had just tasted. Around the room we’d go, calling out flavor descriptors for each blind-coded coffee we’d tasted. Lower scoring coffees would be given descriptors like clashing flavors, rough, astringent, disjointed. The coffees that scored well enough were described as balanced, sweet, clean finish. But the stars of the cupping table would open the flood gates of descriptors: lychee, mandarin, floral, ripe red apple, winey.

It only took one or two flights before a young, eager cupper such as me was able to calibrate to the group. And so it was in Neiva, Colombia, in 2006 that I drank the Kool-Aid, the flavor mantra of almost every coffee competition for the past two decades: “Tart is king. Balanced is boring. Bitter is bad.”

This hierarchy of flavor pointed to one key attribute as the measurement of quality: acidity. The most revered flavor callouts were attributes that could largely be tied to organic acids—citric, malic, quinic, and (the king of late) lactic. These acids and their associated flavors and mouthfeel can be tied to the species and variety of tree, the elevation of the farm, the ripeness of the cherries, and the meticulous processing of the coffee. All of these attributes related to terroir are important and worthy of the spotlight. These unique flavors have led to some amazing and well-deserved recognition for coffee producers, roasters and cafes, as year after year record-breaking prices are paid for smaller and smaller lots of coffee with more and more exotic flavor descriptions.

Barista Competitions: Fuel on the Fire

The arrival of barista competitions added fuel to the fire. Each year, roasts are getting lighter and lighter, fermentations longer and longer, and there’s no slowing the fruity freight train. I should know, as I had the deep and humbling honor of roasting for two United States Barista Champions.

In 2014, I roasted the competition coffee for Laila Ghambari, who was the director of coffee for Cherry Street Coffee at the time. The coffee was produced by Emilio Lopez Diaz of Finca El Manzano in El Salvador. While cupping potential competition coffees at the farm, Ghambari had the brilliant idea of combining washed, honey and natural process coffees. With what at the time was a “light” roast, this coffee popped with all the sparkle and clear apple notes.

Later, in 2019, I roasted for Sam Spillman, who was the head trainer for Dillanos Coffee Roasters. We visited La Palma y El Tucan in Colombia to select an anaerobic fermentation natural Geisha. Raspberry, cranberry and floral dominated the flavor of this coffee.

Two amazing champions, two amazing producers, and two amazing coffees. But do these coffees tailored to win competitions have a place in the real world?

I recently took an informal poll of a dozen coffee drinkers. There were two trained tasters, but largely the group was made up of enthusiasts. I asked them to offer a few flavor descriptors that made them want to try a coffee, and to volunteer any descriptors that would make them steer clear of a coffee. Table 1 (below) shows the results. The terms honey and chocolate led the polling for positive characteristics, while tobacco and smoky were mentioned as negative descriptors. Interestingly, some descriptors like citrus and fruity appeared on both the positive and negative lists.

This is by no means an exhaustive study, but it does point to the obvious wide variance of taste preferences among coffee drinkers. If we, as coffee professionals, perpetuate a system where the only way for a coffee to win a competition or score in the 90s is to be roasted very light, have pronounced acidity, and exhibit exotic fruit flavors, we may find ourselves quite lonely at the top.

Style Guides

This divergence of popular opinion from that of the cognoscenti is nothing new, but left unchecked, it can push people away from a deeper appreciation of coffee. The wine industry has had its battles with this as the hardcore wine aficionados look for generally deeper, dryer, possibly more tannic red wines, while some wine drinkers just want a red that is juicy and rounded. However, I don’t know that the wine industry has any need to make their product more ubiquitous.

An industry that parallels coffee much more closely is craft beer. Not too dissimilar to coffee roasteries, it can seem sometimes that every town has a brewery. There are even similarities in the selection and roasting of barley into malts. So, how does the beer industry approach interactions with its consumers, and how does it define quality?

At one time, I was an avid home brewer and decided to go through the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP). It was wildly enlightening, and I think we as an industry could glean a few things from it. In the most recent style guide, which was updated in 2021, there are 34 major beer styles outlined, with additional subcategories under each style. For example, beer style No. 1 in the guide is Standard American Beer, with the subcategories of American Light Lager, American Lager, Cream Ale and American Wheat Beer. It is a comprehensive guide intended specifically for judging beers in competitions.

For each style, the guide outlines a short description of its history as well as key attributes including color, dominant flavors, off flavors (defects), and even target IBUs (bitterness) and alcohol percentages. This allows elbow room at the table for every style of beer. And if a particular beer doesn’t fit within a specific style, there is always category 34C: Experimental Beer. You’d be hard pressed to find a certified beer judge who turns up their nose at a Baltic Porter saying, “Eww, dark beer. I only judge IPAs.”

Whether someone is judging a beer in a competition or at their dinner table, the style guide provides the framework for a more objective process of grading versus the stated goal of the brewer. This is the seed that grows into a unified understanding that shapes the conversation at every stage in the beer industry. From the Craft Maltsters Guild member to the Master Brewer to your local bartender, each is better suited to lead a beer drinker to a beer of their liking thanks to the style guide.

A New Approach to Scoring

Recently, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has been leading a charge to reinvent the way coffee is scored. This initiative, spearheaded by Peter Giuliano, chief research officer for the SCA, is shining a light on the differences between “descriptive” versus “affective” analysis of coffees. Giuliano recently described these differences and progress of the new scoring program at Roast magazine’s Roast Summit. (His presentation is available online at roastmagazine.com.)

Descriptive qualities of a coffee can be described as the intrinsic, objective characteristics of a coffee, while affective qualities capture the coffee drinkers’ reactions to these descriptive qualities. In his presentation at Roast Summit, Giuliano succinctly broke down a hypothetical statement describing a coffee. The statement—“It tasted floral and sweet; it was the best!”—could be broken down into two parts. The first half (“floral and sweet”) is a descriptive statement, and the second half (“it was the best!”) is an affective statement regarding how the person was affected by the flavor profile and experience of drinking this coffee.

When I asked Giuliano if he considered cup score to be descriptive or affective, he acknowledged that the number applied to a coffee is indeed affective and reflects the experience of the coffee drinker. I would say it is a case of beauty being in the eye of the beholder. If I score a coffee as 99 points but it does not appeal to my customer, then I’m building a figurative wall between us and driving a disconnect from the supply chain that serves no one.

My hope is that a new approach to scoring can bring the average coffee drinker into the process rather than keeping them on the outside. The risk of continuing down a path of singularity of quality is that the coffee consumer may burst our collective bubble of pomposity. Historical styles of coffee need not be shamed and eliminated; perhaps they deserve description and inclusion. There is elbow room at the coffee table for traditionalists, devotees, and new wavers.

***

Phil Beattie is the director of coffee for Dillanos Coffee Roasters of Sumner, Washington. He has been roasting, sourcing and cupping at Dillanos for over 22 years, and is a past chair of the Roasters Guild. He is certified in quite a few things, but most of all considers himself wildly fortunate to work in coffee.

Advertisement

By Anne Cooper

We’ve all been there at some point in our roasting careers—we’re mid-roast and all of a sudden we lose all indications of our roast data because the computer has frozen. Or there’s a bad internet connection. Or maybe a low battery shuts down the laptop, an update starts loading at the wrong moment, we accidentally close the software app, there’s a loose cable connecting the phidget/data bridge, the probe is worn out or damaged, a rodent has eaten through the wiring (yes, it happens!). And that’s just to name a few.

Software companies have made amazing contributions to the industry, and with the broad adoption of this innovative technology, roasting software is becoming heavily relied upon in our everyday operations. What do we do when it fails mid-roast and we have no choice but to finish the roast on our own?

This article is a guide to what to focus on as roasters so we may stay sharp and alert and be able to troubleshoot our roasting and keep it on track in the event of software failing. What are the critical skills and strategies we can and should use in order to finish the roast and produce a desirable/sellable product without anyone knowing we lost our roast data/software mid-roast?

Ultimately, the core skill we need to connect with is our senses. “For me, it’s all about the senses at that point,” says roasting consultant Rob Hoos, “and knowing enough about the development time and end of roast temperature that I am aiming for to be able to finish the roast appropriately.”

To further define this reliance on our senses, we should remind ourselves of the fundamental concepts of roasting: What exactly is roasting, or what are we focusing on “sensing” while the beans are roasting?

A running joke in the industry, roasting is logically and essentially “turning beans brown.” During the browning process, we are focusing on the physical color changes of the beans and the timing of these key physical changes/events which, from tasting and personal/subjective anecdotal experience (not yet via science), we’ve discovered that making the beans physically change at certain times and rates in the roast has a massive influence on specific end flavors.

Often referred to as an old-school and subjective technique, noting the physical color changes of the bean throughout the roast is absolutely fundamental to the “how” of roasting. As roasters, we must bring to the roasting machine how we want to roast—how do you want to turn those beans brown, or at what rate do you want to see the beans go through the various stages of physical color change?

Not knowing how you want to roast is by far one of the most unsustainable practices in roasting. And, with a reliance on software and “lines on the screen,” it seems over time we have become dangerously obsessed, using wasteful practices in the pursuit of perfection, trying to achieve the perfect, straight look of the temperature lines in the software.

We’ve lost sense of the how because we were told it is old school and too subjective to watch and mark the coffee physically changing color during roasting. But the how of roasting is the main sense/technique that we dearly need to rely upon when those “perfect lines” disappear mid-roast!

Which raises the question—are we roasting the software or the beans in the roaster? Software is imperative for consistency in production environments, there is no doubt about that, but it can also make us lax toward the fundamental basics of trusting/building our senses during roasting, thus separating the roasters from the roaster operators.

There’s nothing wrong or old school about watching and smelling the coffee during a roast, identifying the physical color changes, and knowing what that means for your roasting and desired end flavors. Watching the coffee physically change color is roasting—just like cooking. Would you eat food from a chef who never looked at or smelled the food they were cooking? Absolutely not!

Knowing how to watch the beans physically change during a roast is paramount to making good roasting decisions. It’s often a case of “when do we look at and interpret the software” versus “when do we look at the coffee beans cooking in the roaster” so we can then decide on what to do with the heat application and general operation of the roaster in order to produce a desired roast level and flavor outcome.

Practicing this is a core strategy and skill that will allow us to be more objective when calling/marking the physical color changes of the beans and thus allow us to be decisive and able to finish the roast in the event of software failing mid-roast.

No lines? No worries! Trust your sense of sight and smell.

So, along with using our senses to watch and smell the stages of green to brown, we also need to use our sense of time—marking and making key physical changes/cooking events occur at specific times, which is also enormously subjective to cultural palate and specific to a baseline product profile as defined by us and our customer base.

Referred to as phases, noting the desired target time (not percentages) for each of the three key phases in the roast profile (marking green to yellow, Maillard/yellow to first crack, and first crack to end) is something all roasters should do to clearly define a baseline profile for a specific product/roast level. These timed phases or the sequential progression of the beans cooking at a particular rate is far more informative to a baseline profile than software lines on the screen. (Yes, I did just say that!)

So, in the event of a software failure, if we at least know the target times (not percentages) for each of the three phases, we will then be able to easily finish a roast by matching these phase times to the physical change/color and the desired end roast level.

An indication of time and the timing of the phases/stages of the physical changes of the bean (green to brown) is the one thing we can’t do without when roasting, and the one thing that can be transferred across different machines, as was proven through research published in the article titled “Can you Taste the Roasting System?” in the May/June 2019 issue of Roast.

Time was also the main thing all the roasters polled for this article said they relied on in the event of a software failure.

“I run a separate timer, and I can also rely on the difference between the temp on the roaster to the temp of the thermocouple connected to the software,” says coffee roaster Chris Priestly. “Also, time and appearance and smell. I know when it’s coming in to [first crack] smell-wise, and sight for green to yellow, and also roast depth after [first crack]. Time, smell and sight.”

We practice and learn and show ourselves what flavors we like and don’t like through thorough recordkeeping in the form of a roast log, making sure we write down the right information, meaning anything related to time and the three key phases of the roast.

Having a roast log is the best way to help you define your profiles (and phases), so you can roast, record, taste and analyze to show yourself what you like and don’t like about a specific roast level/profile.

You will then know what to keep doing to create a baseline profile strategy.

The roast log will also help to show you how to best dial in a new coffee based on a past profile that worked for coffees with similar properties. It is always baffling to hear roasters say that they often head into a roast not knowing what to expect. You must head into a roast with a plan on how and when you want key events or phases to occur so you can make good decisions on how to apply heat to a specific coffee with specific properties to ensure that key physical events/phases happen on time.

Heading into a roast with a baseline plan/strategy of the timing of key events/phases will basically force and teach you how to use/operate/adjust the roaster in order to make key events/phases happen at the right time. If you don’t show yourself how to do this with your recordkeeping, you will definitely be in a pickle in the event of software failing because you won’t know how to connect time to a key physical event to keep your roast in line to a desired outcome.

So, keeping a roast log is imperative to successful roasting and super helpful in situations when software fails.

Nick Rozental of Paddle Brew Coffee Lab in Indonesia had some great points on what he does with roast logs. “All our machines are set with data logging software, but we also keep old-school technology on hand as a backup,” he says. “Each roaster has a basic handheld timer, and we also keep the old-fashioned paper roast log or printed software log to monitor the roast, just in case s--- happens! All our roast profiles have a [paper] log attached to them as a reference that we use as a label pre- and post-roast as well as cupping. We love technology and cloud-based data, but nothing beats a visual label/log on a green or roasted bucket. This way we can keep running the roast based on time, and we can estimate the temperature and the next steps to take.”

Other key strategies include having an updated list of the general heat strategy steps and machine adjustments written down separately to refer to—something most roasters do naturally—and have them somewhere close to the roaster so you can easily grab them when needed. “Download and print your current roast profiles, or have them on a different computer, so you can access the profiles,” says Mike Ebert of Firedancer Coffee Consultants. “Obviously, have them accessible to the roaster itself. Having access to what you need to do will help inform what you might need to do on the roaster.”

And if you still have the ability to read the temperature on the control panel, manually note the temperature every minute so you can still work out the rate of rise on the go, something most roasters said they would worry about not having access to in the event of software failing.

Which reinforces even more the importance of practicing the skill of being able to manually roast, log and calculate on the go without the aid of software, along with knowing how to revert to the control panel if needed. Don’t ignore those control panel readouts just because they don’t match the computer. Always have a backup record of matching temps for the control panel versus the software.

Some other strategies roasters said they implement in case of software failure include:

• Always have a spare timer nearby that can be used as soon as a problem with the software is identified.

• Have an extra probe installed that is being read elsewhere, independent of the software.

• Know how to use/read any analog temperature gauges. Usually these will be reading the environment more than the bean, so knowing how to also roast with the analog environment temperature gauge is a great skill to have.

• Have a list of steps/adjustments written down nearby for when the screen completely disappears and/or if you can’t swipe back to the cloud-stored app/profiles.

• Have a second computer available that can be used as a backup.

• If you can, go to the cloud-stored profiles and double check profile steps/adjustments.

• Rely on smell and sound. Practice monitoring/defining the smell at various stages and listening to the resonance of the beans at cracking to help troubleshoot/adjust heat accordingly.

• Color check against the same product parameter standards to also make sure the final product is within spec.

• Do triangulation tastings to compare with the same product that was roasted with software from start to finish.

• Practice for if and when this may happen to you. Actually deliberately try and roast just with time and physical markers to help create muscle memory, so if you do find yourself in a software failing situation, you will ignite your instincts and get yourself out of the roast without any unnecessary panic.

If we don’t practice or have a record of key events/times/phases, we could end up in a scenario of having to throw away a batch of (potentially very expensive) coffee because we didn’t know how to use our senses to get ourselves through the rest of the roast.

In these times of inflation and high prices, we can’t afford to be practicing the very wasteful “burn to learn” philosophy. We need to back ourselves up by writing everything down because you will thank yourself immensely when there is a software failure and you are able to roast your way out of it successfully and calmly, backed up by all your manually recorded information.

Overall, there really is no right or wrong method—manual roasting versus software—just as long as in the event of software failing, we as roasters are fully connected to our baseline profile strategy, which is predominantly about being able to consistently identify and make key physical changes/phases happen at the right time in order to produce the desired end flavor for a specific bean, process and end product.

As Rozental so eloquently summarizes, “All our senses activate, and we look at the color, smell and listen. We might lose a bit of quality, and not be as precise, but at least it’s not a full loss. We are also sometimes positively surprised by the results being better than the software reference. No beans left behind.”

***

Anne Cooper is an Australian roaster who has gained extensive experience in her 29 years in the coffee industry. A former member of the Roasters Guild Executive Council and Education Committee, Anne now works with her training and consulting company, Equilibrium Master Roasters. There, she continues to educate and inspire flame keepers of all levels of experience and develop her extensive roasting skills and knowledge  while working on a wide range of roasting machines with small- and large-scale roasting companies, applying various roasting techniques.

Advertisement

Roast magazine welcomes you to Portland, Oregon for the 2023 Specialty Coffee Expo. Roast has proudly made its home in Portland since we launched the magazine in 2004. Whether you’re a Pacific Northwest local or you’ve traveled across the globe to be here with us for Expo, we want to welcome you to our city with The Inside, an insider’s guide to all things Portland.

Portland is known for many things—its vibrant food scene, exceptional wine and microbrewing industries, gorgeous green spaces and, of course, what brought you here today: coffee.

It’s no secret that Portland, like many other cities, faces challenges as it emerges from the pandemic. Yet despite the hardships, the city’s coffee industry continues to shine: Our coffee businesses have shown remarkable resilience, and several new BIPOC-owned cafes have recently opened their doors. With a mix of cooperation, creativity and hard work, Portland’s food and beverage community continues to evolve. And we’re excited to share it with you.

No matter whether you have just a few minutes to grab an excellent cup of coffee at a local roastery, enjoy a languid morning to nosh on one of the city’s famous brunches, experience the beauty of our lush green spaces, or visit a food truck and hit up a dive bar at midnight, we’ve got you covered.

While you’re here, you may see vehicles sporting the bumper sticker “Keep Portland Weird!” One way that Portland keeps it weird is an absolute rejection of basic math. Let us explain: Locals will tell you that Portland is divided into quadrants. Yet Portland has five quadrants. Weird, right? Or, as we like to say, why be even when you can be odd?

As you delve into the sights and experiences that define Portland, here’s your cheat sheet to a few of the many unique neighborhoods within the city’s five quadrants—Northeast, North, Southeast, Northwest and Southwest. Neighborhood coffee professionals will be your tour guides, introducing you to hidden gems throughout the city.

Thank you for joining us in Portland for this year’s Expo. Now get out and explore!

Warm wishes,

Connie and the team at Roast

Advertisement

The following sessions were presented virtually at Roast Summit on February 16, 2023.

If you missed the live sessions or would like to go back and review the talks from this event, or previous Roast Summits, we have made the session recordings available on our YouTube channel.

Thanks to event host San Franciscan Roaster Co. for supporting this event.

To read session descriptions and speaker bios for these presentations, please visit the Roast Summit 2023 | Online page.

Advertisement

By Ian Fretheim

Cupping is one of the most interesting and engaging activities available to specialty coffee professionals. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most gate-kept, poorly defined and, arguably, antiquated activities. Sensory science has come a long way since its inception in the 1940s. Nevertheless, the general approach to cupping in specialty coffee is as if little of that had ever happened and is itself much the same as when it was conceptually introduced in the mid 1980s, and certainly as when it was refined in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Forthcoming updates, for example to the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) system, are certainly needed, and it is my sincere hope that these updates warrant new entries on the cupping form family tree.

While there are real limits to the suitable application of sensory science tools in many of the common use cases associated with assessing specialty coffee, there are also notable shortcomings in the common approach to cupping. The SCA’s recently published Coffee Sensory & Cupping Handbook provides an excellent and concise primer; however, it does not sufficiently prioritize the application of its contents to addressing and advancing the outdated and unreliable components of the current cupping model. In some cases, the current proposals even entrench problematic concepts (e.g., equating distinctive attributes with quality). In other cases, they complicate assessment by adding traditional descriptive and check-all-that-apply, or CATA, components on top of the legacy affective ones (indicating acceptance or preference). Each of these are valid options for the applications that they were designed for, but those applications are notably different.

Independent companies have much more freedom to innovate (I do not envy anyone charged with herding the collective cats of us, the specialty coffee industry) and several have sought to uncover, implement and integrate as far as we could applicable sensory science principles and protocols in our cupping programs, and specifically in the development of new cupping forms.

As an example of this innovative work, Cafe Imports’ newly developed cupping tool—the Coffee Rose—comes after two years of work to build a new suite of tools for coffee assessment. These new tools include a new cupping form, scoring engine, lexicon with assessment value standards, flight building and blinding module, and various reporting features.

Before diving into the specifics of the Coffee Rose, let’s explore some of the challenges inherent in the existing quality measurement tools available to the specialty coffee industry.

Quality and Standards

Two notable contributing factors to the mismatch between coffee cupping and sensory science are the former’s misapplication of the concept of quality and its lack of supporting valuation standards. Quality is not a measurable coffee attribute; it is a judgment that humans apply to coffee attributes. Think of it like this: A coffee cupper (with the proper training and experience) can tell you if a coffee’s acidity is predominantly citric or malic, and again how intense that acidity is; however, determining the quality of those acids at given intensities or in various contexts is a different order of procedure that requires active value judgment and decision making.

Humans don’t decide how much or what kind of acidity a coffee has. We do decide how we value those things, or how distinctive we think they are when we observe them. It is important to note that such a decision (that of quality or valuation) will always be made somewhere in the assessment process. The issue here is in leaving it to the cupper to decide on the fly, versus the superior alternative of building it into protocols via form design and transparent valuation standards.

The valuation decision registers little difference between the concepts of quality and distinctiveness. Both require but often lack explicit standards that transparently lay out value differences between one attribute and another. Surely we are not proposing that the entire coffee assessment paradigm should default to whoever makes up the most creative words or has the least coffee exposure (where everything novel is distinct). Surely the immediately distinct and, in much of specialty coffee, rarely tasted attributes of Monsooned Malabars and Vietnamese robustas are not intended to rate in parity with boutique and meticulously processed arabicas, nor even with the well-processed examples that have become so common as to already be undervalued in today’s specialty coffee environment. Surely the goal is not to undermine the work for coffee sector equity by defining quality in terms that can be meaningful only when applied with exclusivity and that are inevitably personal in scope.

Surely these are not the case. And yet, here we are. Just as there is no document stating that malic and citric acids are equivalent, better or worse than one another, there is none stating that either is equivalent, more or less distinctive than the other. Ultimately this may be for the best. At the industry leadership level, it is likely more appropriate to introduce ideas, tools, guidelines and guardrails than hard standards. Imposed standards are rarely engaged enthusiastically, are thankless to develop, and have proven impractical to apply across such a broad and decentralized space as specialty coffee, in particular with such highly personal metrics as “good” and “distinctive.”

That being said, guardrails are important and, to the extent that we wish to speak about transparency and equity, are owed to those we buy coffee from on the basis of our assessments. If assessment is to factor into the terms of a transaction, then the terms—and values—of assessment must be defined in advance of that transaction. Importantly, the promotion and use of standards does not require industry-level standardization, nor does the removal of “good” and “bad” from cupping forms remove them from coffee assessment.

The Cafe Imports Coffee Rose

This is an exciting time to be in specialty coffee. While the challenges are well ingrained and the answers are not obvious, we’re seeing more and more participants take a crack at finding a way forward. Our solution, the Cafe Imports Coffee Rose, aims to provide a synthesis between the analysis of sensory science and the experiential interpretation of specialty coffee.

The Coffee Rose is an interactive, dynamic, rich content CATA cupping form paired with a user independent scoring engine. The cupping form is presented in the familiar format of a flavor wheel, which itself functions as the CATA array, where each of the flavors, aromas and tastes displayed are active buttons that can be used to select, combine and endorse applicable coffee descriptors.

The “rich content” component refers to two primary attributes of the Coffee Rose. The first is its tiered structure and the ability to endorse either simple, individual descriptors or to build and endorse more complex descriptor strings. The second is that the Coffee Rose’s endorsement protocol uses an indication for intensity, more along the lines of Cafe Imports’ current Qualitative Descriptive Analysis form. These two components allow us to pack significantly more descriptive punch into our CATA array than would be possible in a static list or table format. The “interactive and dynamic” components refer to the way the Coffee Rose alters its appearance depending on the inputs provided, expanding its active section as well as visually providing reference to the underlying scoring standard, though without compromising the principle separating the assessor from the final valuation process in favor of focusing them on the descriptive. We do this by providing a live indication of connotation—unused descriptors have a neutral color that matches that of their category. When selected, descriptors with a net positive connotation are tinted lighter, while those with a net negative connotation are shaded darker. This tinting and shading stacks back down through any prior descriptor strings to the root category button, which displays the net contribution—positive or negative—that it is making to the overall coffee score (see Figure 5).

Structure

The Cafe Imports Coffee Rose is composed of seven attribute categories, four increasingly descriptive tiers, and an intensity indicator. These combine to create a multi-dimensional, descriptive coffee scoring form that is sensitive not only to the broad qualitative categories that we are accustomed to but also to the degree of specificity noted within each, the specific content of notations, and the quantitative intensity of each impression.

The Coffee Rose is sensitive to:

Category: equivalent to attributes on a common cupping form; these provide context for a description but not much descriptive detail; acidity is measured separately from sweetness. (See Figure 1.)

Specificity: how general or specific descriptions are; on common forms specificity is decoupled from scoring; “Specific” tier descriptions have greater descriptive power and value impact than “Qualifier” tier descriptions. (See Figure 2.)

Content: the specific content of descriptors and descriptor strings; on common forms content is decoupled from scoring; apricot has greater value in the Cafe Imports system than coffee cherry. (The difference in value reflects our company’s preference for apricot over coffee cherry. This ensures the descriptors are given equal numeric value for all users, unlike the traditional system.) (See Figure 3.)

Intensity: how intense a descriptor impression is, relative to a reference; common cupping forms tend to be qualitative whereas the Coffee Rose is quantitative; higher intensity descriptors have a greater impact on coffee description and score than lower intensity descriptors. (See Figure 4.)

The Scoring Engine

Driving the Coffee Rose, we have what we call the scoring engine. The scoring engine assigns values to individual entries on the Coffee Rose, calculates values for descriptor strings, sorts and tallies category and then sample-level scores, processes the descriptor strings into natural language forms, and selects from a coffee’s generated descriptor pool for top-level descriptor output.

On a standard cupping form, scores are generated on the basis of values being assigned to attributes by assessors. For example, I might score the flavor of a coffee at 8.5 and then elsewhere on the form describe that flavor as chocolate and raspberry. Someone else might describe the flavor as chocolate and raspberry, but only score it at 7.5. Another person might score the flavor at 8.5 but describe it as savory and floral. Yet another person might score it at 8.5 without offering any description at all.

On the Coffee Rose, attribute scores are generated directly on the basis of descriptive notation and intensity indication. These scores are therefore sensitive both to how attributes are described qualitatively as well as to the quantitative intensities at which those descriptions are observed. While it is still obviously the case that two people can generate different descriptions and arrive at different outcomes for the same coffee, similarity in descriptions reduces differences in scoring when using the Coffee Rose. Further, the differences that do arise between cuppers are made computable by the Coffee Rose and scoring engine, as opposed to when they are individually generated ad hoc. For more information, supporting materials, and a sandbox demo version of the Coffee Rose, please visit cafeimports.com.

Balancing the Precise with the Personal

One of the driving goals for this project was to bring our cupping program into greater alignment with sensory science, but without forcing a round peg into a square hole. For the longest time, I thought that in order to hew closely to the sensory science line I would need to push back against the qualitative, preference and personal language aspects of cupping in favor of emphasizing the quantitative, numeric and measurement components. Indeed, some pushback on this is warranted. As is some finesse.

In the real world of coffee assessment, there is rarely time for the sample sizing and replication common to sensory science studies, which are highly oriented around statistical validation. Further, much of specialty coffee cupping, in practice, boils down to the communication, description and sharing of a human tasting experience that is explicitly not captured by cupping scores.

In many ways, a strict sensory science approach (of the sort that I initially imagined) runs the risk of taking the “specialty” out of specialty coffee, at least for the specialists. Do we want that? By the same token, we have to ask ourselves if we’re okay with the meaning of “specialty” in specialty coffee being anecdotal, imprecise and personal. As much as we may prefer to deny that it is these things, as much as we may want to project rigorous (and dare I say “scientific”) precision and validity, at bottom I suspect that in large part we are not quite willing to let these things go entirely. And beyond shoring up some fundamental issues, I’m not sure that we should be.

There are no “otherworldly beautiful coffees” in the sensory science lab. Nor is there iconoclastic, cynical and delicious rejection of norms. There are just samples with more and less sweetness, more and less acidity, etc. But coffee is clearly personal. From the habitual drinkers who “can’t start the day without my coffee,” even if it’s simply a grocery store ground drip, for whom coffee is already on an equivalent linguistic (and one suspects existential) footing as their very day, to the deep-cut connoisseur who knows more about their morning (and afternoon, and evening) extraction than most of the people involved in getting it to them, coffee is clearly a very personal thing for many. Within the industry, it is the coffee that “I grew” or “I processed” or “I roasted” or “I dialed in and perfected,” or they are the flavors that “I identified” or “I experienced” or “I described.”

The highly personal nature of coffee is a large part of the reason we trade so heavily in anecdotes. It’s our love language and our mother tongue. From my experience, most specialty coffee professionals have at least one go-to anecdote describing their (generally eye opening, if not outright life changing) introduction and entry into specialty coffee, and many have more than one. As for precision, for all of our sifting of coffee grounds and weighing of … everything, at the end of the day most of us still just end up talking about what we like and don’t like, rather than measuring the components of the coffee solution we just took so much care preparing. While lacking in precision, this is deeply personal and often is best expressed through anecdote in an attempt to capture and share (and proselytize and defend) something of the personal novelty not just of the coffee, but of one’s own experience of the coffee, of what the coffee did to them and how it made them feel. Anecdote is the medium of the personal, and that space is naturally imprecise.

We may not want to completely eliminate the personal, anecdotal and imprecise aspects of specialty coffee, but I think that we need to recognize, balance and temper those things with practices that reduce their noisiness and bias, making them more reliable and transparent. In doing so, they can become more descriptive and expressive, supported by the widely recognized foundations of sensory science. As instinctively (and, I think, correctly) as we reject the idea that someone else might dictate to us what is good and what is bad, we must also recognize the untenable position of transacting on the basis of good and bad in a market without compass, let alone standard, for what is good and what is bad. Ultimately, the outputs from our sensory tests should not just be accurate, transparent, reliable, understandable and communicable, they should also foster communication and connection.

***

Ian Fretheim is the director of sensory analysis at Cafe Imports. In 2016, he developed and launched one of the only quantitative descriptive analysis (QDA) cupping forms in specialty coffee. In 2018, he obtained the Sensory and Consumer Science certificate from UC Davis and has since focused on developing practical applications from sensory science for the world of specialty coffee.

Advertisement

Roast magazine publisher Connie Blumhardt sits down with Chris Kornman, the author of "Additive Fermentation: 'Infused' Coffee is Gaining Popularity—and Sparking Industry Debate" from the January/February 2023 issue (read the article or listen to the Audio Article).

Read the Article or Listen to the Audio Article

Before or after watching the interview with Chris Kornman, be sure to read the full article “Additive Fermentation: 'Infused' Coffee is Gaining Popularity—and Sparking Industry Debate” or listen to the audio article version:

Advertisement