Why is a roasting log important?
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It's about repeatability, building a personal information database on your roasting and continuous improvement. If you don't know what you did, how it went what you changed and whether it was better, it's quite hard to improve your skills as a home roaster. It becomes especially important over the years, when you repurchase a particular bean type and can look back over the lock to see a snippet of information you had forgotten (such as a particular max temperature setting you found best for that bean).
If you want to create a roasting log online Online Shared Roasting logs
It never ceases to surprise me how many home roasters do not keep a detailed log and how even less share those logs on forums. In fact most forums seem totally devoid of any detailed or useful information on bean types, roast times (1st 2nd crack times etc.) and other information. I suspect in many cases this is because people are unsure of what they are doing and don’t want to look foolish, or perhaps give people information they are not sure is right. When information is given it is usually from a particular frame of reference, that isn’t well defined, so again isn’t helpful e.g. my roast took 6 minutes to get to 1st crack and finished at 9 minutes. Now we might be forgiven for thinking this is a tad quick….but if the poster omitted to mention they were roasting 60g in a popcorn popper….then we may both be seeing the information from 2 different frames of reference.
I have attached a basic roasting log for my Toper Cafemino roaster to this article and although not perfect, it’s a good starting point. It could have much more information on it…but then I freely use the comments field for other information (such as ambient temp and humidity). I would hope that other people will add their own roast log examples to this article in time.
A few examples of completed Hottop roast logs are shown below
