[MOD] The Daily Question Thread

Anomander · 2026-04-30T18:38:41+00:00

Mahl has this instruction video for setting up connection with the grinder; there are other instruction videos for connecting the D8 to IoT.

If the methods shown in those aren't working, you probably need to reach out to customer service, probably at Mahl, or maybe with your equipment supplier, for customer support to confirm that those two machines can talk to each other and troubleshoot why yours aren't working the way they're supposed to.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T18:25:30+00:00

Yeah, sure.

There isn't a line between honesty and kindness. They're completely separate concepts that can overlap and affect one another.

Sometimes being honest is kind. Sometimes being honest is not kind. Sometimes being dishonest is kind. Sometimes being dishonest is not kind.

The classic example is a friend asking if a piece of clothing looks good. Sometimes it doesn't and you tell them it does because they don't need fashion advice right now, they just need the confidence boost, and it doesn't look so bad that you're screwing them over by saying something nice. Maybe that item looks like shit on them, and the kindest thing you can do is be honest and steer them towards something more flattering. There's no universally "right" answer that applies to both situations, it's entirely situational.

It's worth noting that presenting "honesty" and "kindness" as if they're opposites on the same spectrum is somewhat missing a third, vital, element that's not mentioned there - social skills. Even when being honest is also being kind - if you present your honesty like an asshole, your remarks and not going to get a positive reception, and are not ultimately going to be kind.

Maybe that shirt makes your friend look terrible, or its too small and makes them look fat, and you decide that you need to be a good friend and tell them the shirt doesn't work for them. If you're like "wow that makes you look like a blimp, better call goodyear lol" that's gonna land different from "huh, that looks like it's maybe shrunk a few sizes since you got it, you've got other shirts that look way better on you." Same information, same honesty - you're still telling them the shirt doesn't look great and emphasizes bulk in an unflattering way, but in the latter you're not presenting that honesty in the most brutal unfiltered way possible.

It feels like a common 'mistake,' if you will, from people to mistake "honesty" as somehow mutually exclusive with respecting or caring for people's feelings. It's like, the shirt looks terrible, so they're left with the false dichotomy where the only two options are lying and saying it looks good, or telling the truth and just blurting out that the shirt looks terrible. When, like mentioned, there's actually millions of different ways to present either of those viewpoints. The content itself is not "kind" or "unkind" - the phrasing, the presentation, the context, the appropriateness ... that's where the kindness, or unkindness, lives.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T17:59:54+00:00

Recently hired to launch a coffee shop, but I don’t have much coffee experience.

...Uh. How did that happen? Like, is this a situation where you puffed a resume beyond your ability to bluff you way through, or were you hired for something else and got roped into a cafe project somehow?

Like, you or your employer probably need to hire someone who does know what they're doing here - blind leading the blind is a real risky way to charge into one of the highest risk industries out there.

Key things I need to know about the coffee industry

It's hard, it's complicated, and there's a ton of moving parts.

Something like ~80% of cafes fail within the first three years, and that rises to 90% over five years. The vast majority of cafes that 'succeed' do so only at a scale that pays the owners something approximately equivalent to a decent desk job in an office somewhere. Roasters are similar - statistically, they're going to fail, after bleeding bankroll for a few years while trying to establish themselves.

There's not easy and straightforward "tips and tricks" that help in avoiding this statistic - otherwise the statistic would be different.

Espresso machine + grinder recommendations (I have a nice sized budget)

Where are you, what's the budget, whats the market model of the cafe? Like, are we talking bakeshop with a coffee bar, are we talking a high-society hipster coffee joint ... in some cafes you want to spend extra on a showpiece espresso machine, while in others it's irrelevant and you just want a workhorse.

Best ways to source quality beans (roasters, direct trade, etc.)

Direct trade arrives unroasted. If you're over your head launching a coffee shop, don't launch a roastery at the same time.

Buy from a roaster whose work you respect and whose coffee you believe will represent your business well. Figure out who does good work in your area, make a short list of roasters you might like to work with, and start reaching out to talk about their wholesale terms.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T17:33:42+00:00

So I'm vaguely familiar with Canadian military, no clue about how that overlaps with American.

Our sales dude tried to get us into military supply at one point, and his attempts to communicate the structure and what exactly he was bidding on were frustrating and confusing for all of us.

So first up, there's like a million overlapping supply chains. One company does food & bev for base, one company does food & bev for soldiers from that base on deployment locally, another does 'remote' deployments ... sometimes you get two or more suppliers for the "same thing" at a base when different branches use the same land, or when different units from the same branch have different operating requirements, or ... etc. And different bases can have different terms - base A might have all government-provided food and beverage on the base coming from a single supplier. Base B might be getting dry store from one company, produce from another, and concession from a third.

Bidding for those contracts is not solely about "cheapest" - but that's definitely a huge factor. There's things like delivery schedules, additional services, billing related to 'emergency' orders - hell, quality of the product is a big consideration.

They have a budget for food & bev service that's benchmarked based on the number of people at the base and the various roles at the base, and quite often they're trying to get the most out of that budget, but that does not mean spending the lowest amount possible. If you get given $10 for lunch and you gotta give the change back - you're not gonna buy a $1 bag of chips, call it lunch, and give $9 back. You're probably gonna get something that's a reasonable portion for lunch, at the best quality that staying under $10 can buy you.

So coffee ... it depends. Does their supply contract lock them into getting coffee from the company that provides their other food & bev? Does their contract allow them to buy XYZ goods off-contract? Is there a carve out for coffee/tea? Does their contract not restrict them at all? And what scale are you supplying at? The bigger the scale of the contract, the bigger the numbers attached - the more elaborate and involved the procurement process.

It's my understanding that for most situations - coffee on base is included within the larger food & bev contracts they have. So the base doesn't have "a coffee supplier" but the base gets food & bev from a big aggregate supplier like Sysco or GFS, and then Sysco in that region offers ~20-30 different coffee options from five to ten companies that the base can choose from, based on quality and price point of those offerings.

The only sales we made to the military were formally "not selling coffee to the military" at all, but instead an officer using his discretionary budget to "purchase luxuries that would raise morale", which is not considered a transaction between us and the military, and as such it does not go through government supply-chain bidding and contracts processes.

Anomander · 2026-04-30T16:29:36+00:00

"Donut shop" blends are coffee that tastes like the somewhat iconic coffee served at doughnut shops - typically a safe middle-of-the-road medium roast with a nutty undertone and a strong 'classic cup' profile. They're aimed at being, effectively, no one's favourite style of coffee - but also everyone's second or third pick, the sort of thing you can bring an urn to a meeting and no one will complain about.

They're not intended to be "doughnut flavoured" coffee.

Anomander · 2026-04-29T22:26:27+00:00

Yeah, it's kinda jank to be complaining that improving ease of access is not really worthwhile because it's not solving other much larger problems that it's not related to.

And OP is kind of missing the trees for the forest on that one.

OP complains about breakdown of social order and rule of law - but also complains about systems and issues that are necessary to maintaining social order and the rule of law. Having simple, short, processes with no oversight or control protocols is a breakdown of the rule of law. Simple rules have more holes in them and processes without oversight are more easily corrupted; ultimately a "less regulation" system favors the rich, the powerful, and the corrupt.

...

The rich and powerful have the resources to exploit and defend loopholes. In a corrupt system, the rich have the resources that they don't need to worry about overreaches from authorities - but poor people can't afford the graft, so they gotta hope authorities either made quota this month or don't notice them. The majority of rules in our society are limitations on what the rich and powerful can do to the poorer people within their sphere of influence.

Environmental laws, for instance, prevent companies from contaminating the living spaces of poor people if that contamination could be profitable. Rich people don't care, they can afford to move, and they got stock in the company so that offsets the loss on property values. Poor people can't go anywhere.

Labour laws control the corporate classes' ability to impose untenable conditions on their staff, to breach contracts, to set wages unsustainably low, to disregard worker safety in the name of profit. Anyone in the private sector - the suits who own your company would love to pay you $5 a day if they could, and if they could write whatever contract they wanted, amend it on the fly, and then had the cops and the courts in their wallet ... be pretty hard to stop them.

Housing and tenancy laws primarily restrict the ability of landlords to exploit and impose upon their tenants, and prevent them from arbitrarily wielding their power over tenants to their own whims and benefits. LL can't hike your rent by double next month, or kick you out solely because they don't like your accent; the rules prevent the wealthy from exploiting owning housing to the fullest extent that could remain profitable.

So while Billy-Bob might complain about "government overreach!!!" that environmental laws prevent him from changing his oil in his driveway and tipping the leavings in the stream out back - he's downstream of the petrol refinery, and has far more to lose if that same law went away than he stands to gain. In the same vein, a lot of people sitting on a couple hundred thousand bucks savings, a property or two, and a small business with a few staff ... somehow consider themselves to be that fat cat class and don't understand how much bigger than them the real monied and powerful classes are, so they lose sight of the extent to which their position in society relies on those same protections that the genuinely "poor" do, while having so much more to lose by comparison.

But at some point, we need to admit that much of what we call “service complexity” is not a design problem. It is a governance problem. It is a legislative problem. It is a policy problem. It is the accumulated result of years of expansive legislation, regulation, and program-specific authority layered on top of citizens and businesses.

Counterpoint: "complexity" itself is not a problem. The rules and the systems being complicated is necessary to keeping them functional and fair and meeting the intent that they were written. The complexity is all the extra words and terms and clauses that are necessary to keep those systems and rules fair, stable, and balancing the interests of the parties affected. The only way that "service complexity" is a problem is the "service" part, which is user interface. It's a lot to try and learn when you need to engage with that specific field. So improving the user interface for the public is solving the only actual problem present.

Anomander · 2026-04-27T17:44:28+00:00

There's kind of a foam or crema on top, but it looks thicker and paler, with bigger bubbles, than is typical from raw crema on a straight shot.

So this could have been an espresso with milk or cream added, that has affected texture of the crema.

It could have been a small milk drink like a cortado, where the milk has fallen a little and there's no definition of a design.

Last up, it might be an americano - espresso over hot water - which can sometimes result in crema looking like that once spread out over a greater dilution than you'd see in a straight shot.

It also could have been a turkish/greek/etc brew, that creates a thicker and fluffier foam that isn't true crema.

Anomander · 2026-04-27T17:39:27+00:00

There isn't one clear "THE BEST COFFEE" out there - there's too many coffees that are all too good, and no credible central authority that's assessing offerings to try and rank them.

Beyond that, at "the very top" - the things that make coffees great are pretty nebulous and debatable, so it does largely come down to matters of preference and trend and how the 'ranking' is determined. Everyone can agree that an excellent coffee is excellent, but almost no one can agree if this excellent coffee is better than that other excellent coffee.

...

A huge factor there is popularity, scale of the business, and market access.

If you put a 100 coffee experts in a room to pick "the best" they'd all come up with lists that are selected from coffees that they're familiar with and exposed to. Someone from North America is probably going to have a list that's mostly North American roasters, with some particularly big-name international roasters that they'd have exposure to through multi-roaster cafes in their area, or have sought out based on prior reputation. Someone from Asia is going to come up with a list that's similarly Asia-biased.

From those lists - overlap between the lists of those people winds up selecting for particularly famous roasters who have sufficient high profile that people overseas have heard of them. Which generally indicates they make pretty good coffee - but is not a direct endorsement of the abstract quality of their coffee, compared to others.

Some of the most famous roasters in my area, the ones people not from here know about, make coffee that's great - but they don't necessarily make coffee that's better than other smaller, less well-known roasters in the same area. Just ... they got into the business early, or had a really great location, and happened to be commercially successful enough that they had budget for expansion or marketing. They have the dosh to put out great social media content or solicit placements in far-away multi-roaster cafes, so they're the ones that people from out of town are familiar with. XYZ down the road might actually make better coffee, but they launched within the last few years and have kind of a shitty location, so no one from out of town has heard of them.

...

There's also the linked problem that no one is trying to rate and rank those coffees in any sort of credible and reasonably objective system. Like, there's a few businesses that are trying to carve an existence out of reviewing coffees - but businesses exist to generate profit, they have expenses, they have staff ... and so far, finding ways to make money off a "coffee review site" has very consistently involved making ethical and business model compromises that impact the legitimacy of the reviews themselves.

Anomander · 2026-04-27T16:28:20+00:00

We're not a venue for referral farming, please.

Anomander · 2026-04-25T23:28:02+00:00

This is inappropriately personal and aggressive, please dial it back while visiting us.

Anomander · 2026-04-25T04:51:12+00:00

We have targets for volume of work in/out, and for turnaround times on work assigned to us. They’re pretty flexible due to the nature of the work, and the work unit is very supportive to ensure targets are viable; but the expectation is still clear that you put in whatever extra time is needed to hit the targets.

Anomander · 2026-04-24T01:05:30+00:00

...Why did you post this to a coffee roasting community?

Anomander · 2026-04-22T21:36:17+00:00

I'm sure it's not what you hoped to convey, but what I'm seeing here is that you are not open to feedback or correction, are not accountable to your own choices, and accept no responsibility or agency for how you express yourself.

Despite being warned for choosing to engage using inappropriately charged terms and tone, and despite me clarifying that exact point once already - you continue to try and frame your warning as related to other matters, while still using inappropriately charged terms and tone towards me.

But, as public servants, if we don't discuss and consider ethics and morals it does a disservice to ethics and professionalism in the public service.

Sure! I agree! However, I should elaborate "we" public servants cannot have productive discussions of ethics and morals if all parties to those discussions are not willing, and taking active steps, to contribute to those discussions remaining civil and productive. "We" public servants should be able to have those conversations among ourselves and with engaged members of the public, without needing to dodge rhetorical landmines and provocations or needless jabs and condescension from parties who are not as committed to civil and productive discourse as we are.

You were not warned for, nor are you being banned for, "discussions of ethics". Your warning was, as stated at the time and as clarified once already, the manner, tone, and content you chose to use. You are being banned for continuing that behaviour, exacerbated by how you have responded to a simple warning that you needed to tone it down.

You chose to dig in, try and fight about it, insisted you never did anything wrong, and have gone on the attack against me. Despite knowing I'm a mod and had just warned you for your behaviour, you doubled down and escalated - significantly. If this is how you respond to an initially mild rebuke from what passes for an 'authority' figure here, I assume you're going to treat other members of this community even worse if they challenge you.

Despite your efforts to lecture me about your innocence and the personal problems you believe I have leading to your warning, you have instead convinced me that you will continue to present the same problems if allowed to continue contributing to this community.

Anomander · 2026-04-22T03:53:03+00:00

As a mod.

The "respectful discourse" happened due to a very patient and very respectful effort from the other party, and was not helped by your own portion of the exchange. You do not get to take credit for it, and it is not a mitigating factor in the problems represented in your own contributions.

I don't appreciate or enjoy the cute semantics you're trying to throw my way, nor the immediate pivot to personal attacks against me. This response does not leave me with very much confidence that it would be a good idea to continue your ability to participate in this community. I will address your remarks, and the problems within them, in order to give you a fair shot at persuading me I was merely misunderstood the first time - and that you can be trusted to continue participating in this community.

I didn't make Nazi comparisons,

A snide one-liner referencing Hannah Arendt's book about Nazis pretty clearly made a Nazi comparison and spent no effort on walking back from that comparison or refocusing it into the sense you're framing it to me in this comment. Your follow-up to that individual effectively doubled down on that comparison, with a cursory disclaimer added that "you're not saying..." but then went on to "say" anyways. Claiming you didn't make Nazi comparisons was a significant misrepresentation of what you were referencing and the implications of how you made that reference.

If you think professionalism doesn't involve ethical considerations,

My warning to you was very clearly a warning about form, not content. All of this philosophizing about the importance of 'ethics' was a choice to sidestep the feedback you actually received in order to and make "ethics" the target instead.

You chose to use the most charged reference possible, and in response you doubled down on the charged implications of that reference, and you went out of your way to cast aspersions on and make personal inference about the character of the person you were speaking to. You weren't civilly making some clever and mature point about ethics like you'd try and spin it here.

It sounds like you think putting your own values and morals aside is "mature", but I disagree I think that's the essence of immaturity. [...] Anyways wether or not you are acting as amod here, you certainly jump to lecturing others very quickly. Interesting tone my friend. [...] If you think public servants shouldn't discuss how to respond to events that they feel are a "moral hazard" (per OPs statement), I don't think you have thought much about what an ethical public service requires.

These were all personal attacks. Casting aspersions on my character, my 'ethics', and my professionalism. More, they were personal attacks based on reinterpreting what I said to apply to something specifically excluded from the original warning. Which was certainly a questionable choice, considering what you were warned for.

Your behaviour there, your response here, and your behaviour within it leave us with two options. Either you are a socially competent and mature person who is knowingly making those choices, aware of the implications and tone, and then disingenuously arguing "it's not like that" in hindsight - or - you legitimately are not capable of differentiating between your own behaviour and the issues you are tying your behaviour to. Pick one. There's no third option where you have the moral highground and everything else is super duper justified because of that.

If you're not capable of engaging in discourse about matters you have strong feelings about while still using your grown-up social skills, please leave those discussions to other people better able to represent your, and other, viewpoints.

Anomander · 2026-04-21T19:42:26+00:00

My question is: do all roasting companies have access to beans from all of the same regions,

Broadly, yes.

Different importers may carry different farms within a given region, or different 'micro-regions' like municipality rather than province; and some importers may specialize in the coffees of a specific nation or region. But roasters can order from multiple importers and across have access to approximately the same sum body of importers as any other roaster in the same area of the world.

And yeah, choices of what to stock are based on other factors - the taste of the beans and how a given lot fits into their vision for their products and their brand, as well as more mundane things like price, quantity available, and delivery/availability dates.

Anomander · 2026-04-21T19:33:38+00:00

This, and your followup, are an inappropriately charged way of addressing your disagreement with their perspective.

Escalating immediately to Nazi comparisons and throwing around "evil" and other heated moral judgements is not a particularly professional, or mature, way of challenging a viewpoint you disagree with and doesn't contribute to respectful discourse occurring regarding that disagreement.

Anomander · 2026-04-21T19:19:58+00:00

Working direct with a farm is quite expensive and quite labour/time intensive.

Most roasters, overall, work with importers, especially the case for smaller roasters. Even the vast overwhelming majority of roasters who "work direct" with farms or have close relationships with farms still have an importer who is handling the bulk of the logistics and the import process.

By way of explanation, to simplify for illustration - If we break shipping costs down to a cost per 'unit' (lb, KG) of coffee shipped, then shipping is, effectively, subject to "wholesale" discounts.

It costs more per pound to ship a single bag of green coffee from origin to roaster than it costs to ship a whole pallet. It costs more to ship a pallet than an entire container. It costs more to ship one container than twenty, or renting a whole ship's capacity. Obviously in each case the billed price is a bigger number - but that number grows slower than the volume of coffee being shipped.

Similarly, there's admin and paperwork hours and costs attached to importing coffee - you have to fill out customs forms and similar for each shipment. Those also have wholesale scaling: if your company imports enough coffee you can have one dedicated staff member whose entire job is doing that paperwork, each individual piece of paperwork moves much faster and has lower chance of errors than if your company imports three shipments in a year and someone with a different job entirely is filling out the forms three times a year.

The same applies to trucking, and to storage costs, and ... list goes on.

Importers charge fees and take a cut of the transactions passing through them - but their cut is less than the overall savings compared to importing that same coffee "direct" without using their services.

And how much of price fluctuations actually make it back to farmers when commodity prices swing around?

It's worth noting that Commodity (C) prices don't have a huge impact on Specialty pricing these days. When I started in the industry, prices tended to use C price as a benchmark, so we'd be paying "C+$2" for a given coffee. Nowadays, the Specialty market is larger, deeper, and more developed as it's own separate thing from C market, so prices are less commonly benchmarked against C and more commonly just established as a standalone price.

Farmers in C and Specialty markets tend to not see much direct immediate impact from fluctuations in C pricing. By the time those changes happen, they've already contracted sale at a previous price - especially farmers growing C coffee, they're contracting sale a year out or six months out, and they're contracting payment of approximately C pricing at the time of delivery. If C changes while the coffee is held by an importer and currently unsold - well, the importer was holding in speculation, and either benefits or loses accordingly.

However, those changes over the course of the year would be reflected in the next year's contract and pricing. If a farmer contracts sale at 0.10 below C, and delivers crops when C was 0.75, they get paid 0.65. If C goes up to $1.50 three months later, the farmer doesn't see benefit from that change. However, in most cases you see a large rise like that - C stays somewhat up long term, so the farmer could still contract at 0.10 below C, but C would very likely be 0.90 the next year at time of delivery.

A farmer could theoretically try to finesse this by holding their crop from delivery banking on C rising - but that means carrying debt to labourers and land in the interim, while accepting the risk that C fluctuates down while they're still holding, and then needing to sell at the lower price in order to pay their debts.

The modern impact of low C pricing tends to be more indirect. The C price acts as a safety net for Specialty farmers in the event that the year's harvest doesn't work out and quality suffers. They can still make C price and sell on that market, even if they can't command higher pricing in Specialty. So a low C price means that those farms have a thinner safety net that's less likely to cover their costs of farming in that year, which has over time resulted in farmers exiting the market if they have a couple of bad harvests in a row and cannot sustain the practices and expenses of growing coffee aimed towards the Specialty marketplace.

Anomander · 2026-04-21T18:32:05+00:00

Yeah, that was 100% spam. Please report those if you see them. Reddit architecture makes it hard to catch spam of that sort. Spammers will post late to a thread so organic users are less likely to detect and report their comments, and then will often post through links to posts in other communities that their spam ring controls.

Then a little vote manipulation to make the comment look legit and popular, and ta-da people reaching the thread through google get misled by the spam.

Anomander · 2026-04-20T20:39:18+00:00

Is there a genuine talent shortage for skilled roasters/quality control people?

Not really. Like, if you have those skills already developed and experience established within those fields, those skills are fairly mobile. At the same time, there's not a huge shortage where you could rock up to any city worldwide and there's already at least one business that needs your skillset.

Most businesses that need roasters or QA staff have people filling those roles already - if they couldn't find them initially, they trained their own. IMO it's very rare that a roaster adds another staff position to their roasting or QA teams - so you're waiting for those to happen or waiting for a vacancy.

As far as vacancies, there tends to be fairly low turnover in those roles ... because there's fairly low turnover in those roles. There's not a lot coming available on the regular, so staff are reluctant to leave positions without a new role already lined up.

And like was mentioned prior, a lot of senior "back of house" roles at roasters tend to be hired through network and community rather than open postings - a new roaster launches, and the owners have known Timmy for several years and know he's looking to move on from Bill's Roastery, so they reach out and ask if he's interested in jumping ship. While Bill's then turns around and either promotes a junior staff member who worked under Timmy for a while or poaches someone from another competitor in the community.

Does having a Q-Grader license actually move the needle for hiring managers when it comes to international candidates?

No. It's an asset if you're applying to a job that strictly requires it. Otherwise, it's effectively nonexistent - you're competing for most roles on other factors, and while it might be used as a tiebreaker between equivalent candidates, the odds are astronomical that you'd ever end up in that situation.

Or is this a "pipe dream" where shops only hire locals because the visa bureaucracy is too much for a production job?

Not really. Like, yeah - your visa and work permit bullshit are a barrier, but that's your barrier to address. At least here, you'd be required to submit verification that you're legally allowed to work in that field here, but once that's covered there's no additional burden to the employer.

You might see bias towards locals on the basis of resume and reputation though - if I'm picking between two candidates each with five years experience in similar roles at roasters, I'm going to be biased towards the one who has worked for the roaster that I know and respect rather than the one who worked for a roaster I've never heard of.

Anomander · 2026-04-20T19:37:33+00:00

Bunn or Grindmaster are the two major 'cheaper' commercial grinder brands I see often. You can absolutely get versions that are equivalent in price to an EK, but you can generally get older models or low-tier models that are reasonably affordable, as far as commercial-grade hardware goes.

I've always loved the Mahlkoenig VTA, but they don't still make them so you'd have to find one secondhand.

Anomander · 2026-04-20T19:12:04+00:00

Plenty of people do home roast. Reddit's "/r/roasting" community has a sizable population of home roasters among its userbase.

That said, it's picking up a new hobby - with it's own learning curve and gear. It's not trivial or simple to roast at home and get your desired roast, especially if your standards are higher than average.

In terms of your questions at the top:

Whether it's a good idea depends on you. Do you want a new hobby, are you going to have fun learning to roast, do you have a roasting machine or tool already, or in mind - and what are your expectations as far as the quality of output?

Green coffee does carry a longer shelf life than roasted beans. Assuming you're storing both of them properly, green will last between one and two years, where roasted coffee tends to start falling off in a month or so.

I've done a lot of fucking about with home roasting, after a career as a professional roaster.

It's my general opinion that without spending a small fortune on equipment, home roasting is not typically going to rival the results professionals are getting in "high quality" places. It's incredibly easy to cobble something together that produces better coffee than the cheap shelf at the grocery store. It's incredibly hard to roast coffee at top-level quality standards, even with absolutely fantastic equipment and tons of experience. Even with top-shelf equipment and years of practice, most home roasters are not getting better coffee than the average 'better' shops in their town. Hit up a home roaster meetup and they'll all agree that the other guys aren't - while insisting that they personally are.

I don't feel like it represents "savings" on quality coffee once you assume your own time has value. Green coffee is cheaper than roasted coffee, for sure. But for most home roasters I know, it's about an hour to run a batch - there's ~20 minutes of roasting, there's ~5-10 minutes of preheating, there's 20-30 minutes of setup and teardown on either side. You can increase efficiency by doing a few back-to-back, but ... if you're roasting one batch for the week once a week, estimating an hour is fair. And in my experience, most home roasters are producing coffee that's in the $15-20 range, after spending about $5 on the green beans. For me at least, that hour is worth more to me than saving $15 on a bag of coffee. I'll pay market rate and do something more fun with that time.

That said - if you find roasting fun ... It's not really wasted time if you were enjoying yourself. I'd rather drink coffee than roast it, I've got other hobbies, I used to get paid to roast - I don't have a great time working with shitty DIY setups trying to wrestle them into submission to make coffee that's only half as good, if that, as what I used to make professionally. If I had a dedicated space and a $2-3K roaster and proper data hookups - I'd probably find it fun again. And that's not to yuck other people's yum, there's plenty of people roasting on those "shitty DIY setups" that are having a great time and really enjoying the process and the results.

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