Tim Wendelboe: Sample roasting with ROEST
Tim Wendelboe has been our inspiration from before we knew anything about coffee. Today, he has over a year of experience roasting on ROEST. As a roaster, green coffee buyer, and owner of a farm in Colombia, sample roasting plays a big role in Tim’s business. He has shared his routines using ROEST in every part of his job. We hope you will get inspired:
Over to Tim:
About a year ago, at the beginning of the buying season, I started to roast on ROEST. From February till June is the time when I get the most of samples of coffees from farmers where I buy the coffee from. ROEST is a tool we use at least a couple of times a week here in Norway, for many different reasons:
1. As a green coffee buyer
I work with a lot of farmers, not just my own farm, and a part of the work we have been doing for the past eight years is to plant new varieties. It normally starts with a small amount of seeds and it takes about five years to get the first production. Usually it is a very small amount of coffee to roast, taste and see if the variety is working well on the specific farm. Whether it is producing well or not, that’s up to the farmer to decide. I’m helping farmers on the flavour side. Is this the coffee that I would like to buy? The only way to evaluate the coffee is to roast it on a sample roaster.
I buy coffees from the same farmers year after year. We separate each picking by day or by week. Following this process, we must sample roast a lot of samples during the season. For example, I just returned from Colombia where I brought home 30 samples from the farm. Now I need to sample roast and evaluate the samples. Before, I used to stand by the roaster and watch the coffee develop. The technology today is much easier - you make the specific profile for the specific farm and it works for all their coffees. Then I just put the coffee in, and I can answer emails while it’s roasting.
2. As a roaster for quality control
When the coffee arrives in Norway we make a couple of small batches on the sample roaster to check the quality and to get some reference. Ok – this is how the coffee taste like on the sample roaster and it should be at least as good when we roast it on the production roaster. Or even better. This is a very good reference point when we try the roast from the big roaster: to know how it should taste like.
“With ROEST you can cool the coffee while it’s roasting. Getting the coffee to cool down fast is very important, otherwise it’s going to taste flat and bitter. ”
3. For roasting courses
Once a month, we run roasting classes where we have professional roasters coming in. On ROEST we roast also defect roasts. It is a set of bad roasts, training people to recognize green or baked taste of coffee.
Why ROEST?
1. Making profiles is for me the most useful features because of the way I work. It makes my life a lot easier.
2. Having a trier is great. I have another roaster that is also programable for smaller quantities but I’m not able to take out sample and see it. You want to have that feedback by visual look at the beans and say: ok I leave it another five seconds.
3. It is my standard to roast 100g of coffee per batch, even though I have already roasted one or six single beans. It is flexible, I can use 100g profile for 90 or 105g batch size.
4. It’s programable. I don’t have to stand and watch the coffee all the time. I used to have a double barrel old-school sample roaster where both barrels were very different so you would have to constantly check both all the time which was very time consuming.
5. It’s quite intuitive to work on this roaster. You can play with the airflow, heat application, see the graphs.
Watch the video where Tim shares more of what he likes about his ROEST sample roaster.
