The Coffee Roaster's Companion - Scott Rao

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Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine published a Q&A blog. Read the entire blog at:

Light on the Dark Art In Scott Rao’s “The Coffee Roaster’s Companion”

Here is a short excerpt from the blog:

The preface to Scott Rao’s latest book, The Coffee Roaster’s Companion (self-published) immediately describes some of the historic deficiencies in roasting as a scientific pursuit:

Coffee roasting has always been something of a dark art. Although people have been roasting coffee for hundreds of years, little prescriptive or scientific writing about roasting exists. At best, roasters learn their trade by apprenticing under an experienced, competent roaster. More commonly, young roasters learn by trial end error, roasting and tasting countless batches, and develop a system based on folklore and spurious reasoning.

Of course, the book hopes to provide a more reasoned and data-driven approach to this “dark art,” focusing on “light-to-medium roasting of specialty coffee processed in a batch drum roaster in 8-16 minutes.”

Rao, a roaster, former retail owner, consultant and author who may be best known for his book The Professional Barista’s Handbook, says initial sales of the new book are wildly exceeding his expectations, suggesting there may indeed be a healthy population of roasters looking for more written resources to improve their craft.

Divided into 17 chapters — from green coffee chemistry, storage and processing through the entire roasting process to cupping and roasting’s relationship to extraction — The Coffee Roaster’s Handbook presents a kind of systematic, best-practices-driven approach to roasting, one that seeks the common qualities of uncommonly good roasts. “About six years ago, I began to notice that the data of the rare, extraordinary batches all shared certain patterns, regardless of the bean or machine,” Rao says in the preface.

We asked Rao more about the book, how it came to be and what will continue to make coffee roasting a “dark art.”