Benchmarking Quality in Specialty Coffee Roasting

This chapter explores the dynamics of specialty coffee roasting and the significance of benchmarking against industry peers. Through personal anecdotes, it underscores the challenges of self-assessment and advocates for blind cupping as a means to enhance quality and foster competition.

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Roasting practices have come a long way in the past few decades. Today enjoy an incredible wealth of information, resources, and sharing of technique to help us be better roasters. With all these tools a techniques available to us it can be hard to sort out the most helpful and practical bits to apply to our coffee roasting operations. This is precisely the problem today's iconic guest, Scott Rao, set out to solve with his latest book, "Coffee Roasting: Best Practices"

Scott Rao has been in the coffee business for over 25 years as a cafe owner, roaster, consultant, and author. The Coffee Roaster’s Companion and Coffee Roasting: Best Practices have influenced a generation of roasters and shaped the global roasting vocabulary and conversation. Scott’s popular Instagram account @whereisscottrao offers expert-level tips and discussion about coffee brewing and roasting.

I have known Scott for a long time and he has truly been a catalyst and force for deeper exploration of coffee brewing and roasting inspiring a lot of conversation and adoption of techniques that push the industry forward to higher levels of consistency and quality.

In this conversation we are not only going to be diving deep into technical aspects of his new book, "Coffee Roasting: Best Practices" but we will also be talking about the philosophies and mindsets toward roasting that we have had in the past and need to have in the future if we are to grow and faithfully represent a coffee's potential to our customers.

We will cover: