The Case for Roasting by Hand in an Age of Automation

No algorithm replaces twenty years of listening to first crack at four hundred degrees.

I spent three weeks last January in a roastery in Addis Ababa that still runs a two-kilo drum roaster from 1974. The cast-iron drum has a hairline crack the owner has welded twice. He will not replace it. "This drum knows my hands," he told me, which is not the kind of sentence that scales.

The Weight of Green

Modern roasting software gives you fifteen-point curves for rate-of-rise, bean temperature, environmental temperature, and airflow. The profiling suites are extraordinary tools, but Abiyot closed his eyes at first crack and adjusted the gas valve by feel. The data told me this should not work. The cup told me the data was measuring the wrong things.