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Ensure that the roaster will not catch fire

Recently I was asked to do a little more work on the RP120 Profile Roasting Practices class. This was offered at SCAA in April and is being offered again at the Roasters Guild Retreat a couple weeks from now (Kathi Zollman is taking on the lead instructor role this time. She's a great choice for that so I'm not worried about the lecture portion at all). Apparently there have been inconsistencies with instructional pacing and difficulties with getting roasters to hit the intended roast profiles. To a certain extent this is a little tricky. Station instructors are working with a small group of people and different groups are going to be coming in with different levels of experience or enthusiasm, different sets of questions are going to be asked. Chances are good that participants will be roasting on a machine that they've never touched prior to the class (though if they're taking this class they should have at least a little experience on some coffee roasting equipment). That's not to say that these problems are impossible or even that they need to be difficult, just that station instructors need to be prepared. I was asked to put together an example script for station instructors to ensure that they would hit all of the main points of the class at about the same time and to help participants hit the profiles. I finished the work on this yesterday and since then what I wrote has been merged into the old station instructor plan, formatting fixed up, and so on. I haven't looked at the new document in depth, but it looks good from a first skim.

Without giving away everything, here are a few things I've added:

Space for notes on the assigned roaster. I think pointing out that station instructors should know what the temperature indicators will read at the main points in the roast and providing them a place to write that down for reference during the class will go a long way toward hitting the desired profiles. Last time I did this class the roaster I was using was initially set up to display measurements in Celsius so that's how I had my notes arranged, but by the time class started it had been switched to Fahrenheit (okay, time to do a bit of arithmetic on my notes). When I was in Brazil there was a roasting session one night on an unfamiliar machine with no calibration data so I got to see some surprise as the temperature measurements were coming in right according to plan and then suddenly (because the measurements had become highly inaccurate, which is not an uncommon issue for drum roasters) first crack and just blowing through the rest of the roast. This is the sort of thing that I don't want to see during the class and it can be avoided if station instructors run a batch before class to familiarize themselves with the machine.

Some choice bits from the new plan with commentary:

"Remember to smile" I have trouble with this one myself so I put in the reminder.

"What does this signify?" I first wrote that as what does this mean but didn't want to cause any catechism flashbacks for those with a Lutheran education.

"Ensure that the roaster will not catch fire" That one's important so I wrote it twice. We didn't have any roaster fires last time around but this is something that can happen and nobody wants to have to deal with that.

#teaching #coffee #roasting #SCAA #RP120