r/roasting

Former Barista trying to get into roasting and I’m looking for realistic pathways into it without immediately taking on the cost of a full roasting facility.

I keep hearing about shared roasting. As in, renting time on someone else’s roaster, using a co-roasting space, or partnering with an existing roaster while building a brand/customer base.

I’d love to hear from people who have actually done this (either as the person renting time or the person offering it).

Is shared roasting legitimately common/viable, or is it more rare than people online make it seem? Have you seen businesses successfully grow this way before eventually opening their own roasting operation? If you rent out time on your roaster, what does that arrangement usually look like? Are most roasters open to this, or protective of their production time/customers?

I’m not necessarily looking to be the next heavy hitting coffee roaster in my city (Philly), but I’d like to roast for the fun of it and make enough slinging beans at markets to support the hobby.

Would really appreciate any insight, warnings, or success stories. Thank you!

I come from a cooking background, and I’ve been deep in the weeds of specialty coffee for the last few months— there was a point when I knew it was inevitable that I’d want to learn how to roast coffee.

I discovered “Popper is a coffee roaster” on Sweet Maria’s through this subreddit, and it made things seem more realistic and afford as a place to start.

I’m also considering that if I am going pursue this hobby, it might just make more sense to spend a couple hundred extra on something like an SR800 roaster.

I’ve found a lot of useful resources in this subreddit, but I’m also wondering what are some things you wish you knew when starting?

I know this is like a science and an art, and I’m sure you all are gonna tell me how challenging it is and to run for the hills, but I hope it’s worth it.

Where do you guys buy green coffee beans for home roasting for low cost? It’s damn expensive even for 5lb bags at $9 per lb when I compare it to roasted 2lb coffee bags found in Costco or other retailers.

I agree that not every coffee bag in Grocery store is good but seems like lately, many Costco and other grocery chains started packing local and national roasters at good rates. Couple of my friends recently got Kirkland Single Origin Ethiopia & Peru roasts at $18 with roast date under a week and seems to have tasted great as per them.

Sweet Marias & Happy Mug was suggested by friends and they indeed have green coffee beans around $7 per lb but you end up in paying for shipping costs separately and that makes it a bit expensive for total costs than those good local or national roasts 2lb bags with recent roast date in retailers.

Looking for quality and affordable green coffee beans from 2lb to 5lb bags preferably under $9 per lb with shipping and everything included.

Does anyone have any recommendations on a good bean for decaf espresso?

Just got a behmor 1600 for 100 bucks and going to start my roasting journey. I see all these opinions on good beans for regular but what about decaf?

Appreciate any input

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I've been roasting for around half a year now and currently working at a roastery. I brought in a new coffee, a Peru Washed, but for some reason it has been crashing every time near the end of the roast. I like to stay medium-light -> medium with my roast degrees, so with an 18lb batch on our roaster, I'll end at a BT of around 405-410ish with 2:00-2:30 development time.

This Peru crashes every time around 395-400 and it's driving me insane! I have tried letting the beans ride through first crack and making less adjustments. My new theory is that I need to charge them at a higher temp. For naturals I'll charge at 400 typically, and for this coffee I charged at 410. Should I charge at 420?

If anyone could shed some light on what is going on, it'd be a huge help. I still have a lot to learn so any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

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ran cropster ~18 months finally bailed. bill kept growing every time we added a seat and we used maybe 30% of what we paid for. felt like renting enterprise software for a small business problem.

back on artisan + a pile of google sheets. inventory in one sheet, costs in another, recipes in a third, cupping notes in a notebook somewhere. every sunday I'm copy pasting numbers out of .alog files for 2 hours. wife is calling it spreadsheet day now

running ~3-7k lbs/month, one production machine + a sample roaster, small team.

anyone at this kind of scale what are you actually using?

inventory and green tracking, cost per lb / margin per sku, not retyping every roast (without cropster pricing), getting multiple roasters into the same system

half the tools i find in this space look (and feel) like they were built in 2012. anything actually feel modern or am i missing something?

Roasted about 5kg for a cafe order. I usually roast in the morning. Usual weather is about 29-31c. Weather was slightly colder at 27c today because it rained. Unhappy with my roasts because the graph on my Artisan was all over the place. Some batches even had burnt chaff due to the initial charge temp. My ET reading was quite high. Couldn't adjust much as I pretty much had the profiles set. I don't know what went wrong? I checked everything such as exhaust fan etc. Nothing is blocked. Is it the weather that affects my roast?

I've started to distrust most of the signals I used to rely on. Nice packaging, good Instagram, even detailed tasting notes — none of it reliably predicts whether I'll actually enjoy the coffee.

So I'm curious what you use instead. Is there anything you look at — sourcing info, roast dates, certifications, how they talk about their farmers — that genuinely correlates with quality in your experience? Or is it just impossible to know until the bag arrives?

I have roasted my own beans a number of times for my wife and me, but was looking at what it would take to start a very small coffee roasting side gig and have been surprised to see most people casually recommending roasters that are like $12,000. Is that the market under hyping capable roasters or is that just how it is?