I'm starting this thread to get collect public responses - an informal poll of the home roaster community on HB. If any commercial roasters happen in, good

So, how many people are like me and go to some website to purchase a coffee they've heard of, only to find it's not available green? Pre-ground, yes, but not green. Now, how many here would buy that coffee already roasted - even though they typically roast their own? Not me. If a coffee is not offered green, I'm not gonna buy it - with one exception: if I find a green i like, i'll probably pick up a pound of it roasted - just to compare my roasts to the professional roasters.

Now, you may think I sound like an idiot (a charge that can be debated, if you wish). After all, these are coffee ROASTERS. They make their business roasting coffee. So why are they going to allow me to do their job, and take away their profit margin? Why are they going to cut themselves out of my business? Allow me to present the following reasons. And please, if you home roast, offer up your own. (or debate mine).

1. A roaster is not cannibalizing his business by selling me green beans. As I've said before, I don't really buy much roasted coffee anymore, except for comparison. Oh yeah, and when i'm away from my behmor. But in neither case is the roaster losing my "roasted beans" orders because they offer greens. If they don't offer greens, I go elsewhere.

2. A roaster is expanding their influence by selling greens. I know the roasters who sell greens much better than those that don't. When I give away my coffee to friends and family, they typically want to know where they can get good coffee. Most don't want to roast, so i find myself recommending the roasters I buy from - those who sell green beans.

3. A roaster is increasing their market share where it counts by selling greens. Ok, this one is a stretch, but I still think there's more worth doing business with the members of HB who roast, than with a random sample of the marketplace. Or are we more demanding and critical (this thread in point)?

4. A roaster can still make a profit on greens. I'll pay a little more than cost to get my greens. I do that anyway with the places that just sell greens.

Do we have enough collective influence to cause some more roasters to start offering greens? And hats off to the ones who already do! Thanks for supporting us.

FWIW there are probably a number of roasters like myself who offer a heck of a deal to walk-in customers who want to buy green. We don't do any mail order so we don't offer green that way either. I get a kick out of the growing number of customers (still a tiny percentage) who want to roast at home. I don't consider it the least intrusive or counter to my business. I usually tack on a buck a pound just so it doesn't become a not-for-profit venture. I figure if a person wants to roast their own I'll be glad to go to the roast room or have a staff member go and scoop out a pound or two for three or four bucks a pound. They always seem satisfied to buy a Yirg or Harrar for 4 or five bucks a pound and a central or South American for maybe three bucks. Often I'll put the home roaster at the controls of the Diedrich IR12 if I'm doing a roast session and walk them through a roast so they can get a little feel of a bigger machine and roast. There must be at least 6 home roasters in all of my area.
Bernie

bernie wrote:FWIW there are probably a number of roasters like myself who offer a heck of a deal to walk-in customers who want to buy green. We don't do any mail order so we don't offer green that way either. I get a kick out of the growing number of customers (still a tiny percentage) who want to roast at home. I don't consider it the least intrusive or counter to my business. I usually tack on a buck a pound just so it doesn't become a not-for-profit venture. I figure if a person wants to roast their own I'll be glad to go to the roast room or have a staff member go and scoop out a pound or two for three or four bucks a pound. They always seem satisfied to buy a Yirg or Harrar for 4 or five bucks a pound and a central or South American for maybe three bucks. Often I'll put the home roaster at the controls of the Diedrich IR12 if I'm doing a roast session and walk them through a roast so they can get a little feel of a bigger machine and roast. There must be at least 6 home roasters in all of my area.
Bernie

Howdy Bernie,

If you were anywhere close to me, I'd be the "guest who wouldn't leave" in your shop, not to mention a greens customer.

If anyone reading this lives anywhere near Bernie's shop, gas up the car (or truck) and head on out! I've had the great fortune to watch a number of pros roast, and have learned something from every one of them (including one roaster I won't name in another country, who I later decided knew less about roasting than I did).

One of these days I'm going to gas up the car and waste several hours of your time in the roaster room. Can't wait!

ken

You'll be more than welcome, Ken. Just remember its all downhill from Idaho to New Mexico. It's the trip back you for which you will need to gas up.
Bernie

Paradise Roasters offers all their coffee selection in green. You can get a lot of green from George Howell's Terroir as well. These are two excellent sources for high quality green beans.

Whilst I agree that offering blends green would be cool from a home roaster's perspective, in competitive markets, there is the reality that some cafe owners will approach other roasters and ask them to make a similar blend at a lower price, and that some roasters will seek to imitate blends in order to create something that they already know that the market will like. A lot of the pro roasters that I know could basically tell you what is in a blend by simply drinking it as an espresso, cupping it, taking a look at the roasted beans and looking at the green offer sheets from the likely suppliers. If roasters were to provide pre-blended green to the public, they might as well just list the blend components and percentages on the side of the pack. That wouldn't actually be such a bad thing, but it's just not how the market operates.

The roasters at work are always playing around with different random experimental blends. One idea that I'd like to try is seeing if they would offer one or two green pre-blends for home roasters to try. This would just be a completely different market and would enable us to share some of the fun that we have behind the scenes.

Cheers,

Luca

luca wrote:Whilst I agree that offering blends green would be cool from a home roaster's perspective, in competitive markets, there is the reality that some cafe owners will approach other roasters and ask them to make a similar blend at a lower price, and that some roasters will seek to imitate blends in order to create something that they already know that the market will like. A lot of the pro roasters that I know could basically tell you what is in a blend by simply drinking it as an espresso, cupping it, taking a look at the roasted beans and looking at the green offer sheets from the likely suppliers. If roasters were to provide pre-blended green to the public, they might as well just list the blend components and percentages on the side of the pack. That wouldn't actually be such a bad thing, but it's just not how the market operates.

The roasters at work are always playing around with different random experimental blends. One idea that I'd like to try is seeing if they would offer one or two green pre-blends for home roasters to try. This would just be a completely different market and would enable us to share some of the fun that we have behind the scenes.

Cheers,

Luca

I'm really not much interested in blends (anymore), other than the odd 2 bean blend I might personally use from time to time (and whose constituents would probably have been suggested to me by someone else). I know a lot of people want to buy preblends from famous roasters, but I think they are kidding themselves if they think they are going to get the same sorts of results as the roasters from whom they buy them.

Forgetting for the moment the whole issue of the quality of most home roasted coffee, you still have the issues of how the coffee is going to taste when roasted in wildly different equipment and to different roast levels. Even if you gave the same preblend to two well regarded professional roasters (with different equipment and almost certainly different profiles and roasting habits) I think it is nearly 100% certain that the two batches would taste differently.

I don't think there really is much point in home roasters seeking out preblends from famous roasters because they are not going to get similar results. Instead, if they want to do blends, they should seek out blends from those who blend for the home roasting market, with these sellers (such as Sweet Marias) hopefully having a bit more experience with what the home roasters are likely to accomplish with the beans, than the pro roasters would.

ken

One advantage of the preblends from SM is that they are designed to be roasted as a blend. Don't most coffee roasters blend post roast, not pre roast, as different beans have different roast parameters? If so, how would homeroasting of these preblend greens fare even if all other parameters were equal? With my limited experience, I blend at home post roast unless it is the rare time I've bought a blend from SM.

Marvin

iginfect wrote:One advantage of the preblends from SM is that they are designed to be roasted as a blend. Don't most coffee roasters blend post roast, not pre roast, as different beans have different roast parameters? If so, how would homeroasting of these preblend greens fare even if all other parameters were equal? With my limited experience, I blend at home post roast unless it is the rare time I've bought a blend from SM.

Marvin

Some commercial blends are pre-roast blends and some are post-roast blends. You can't generalize.

ken

I've purchased Paradise's Espresso Classico (EC) as green, and I'm quite impressed with the results. As good as Miguel's results? No, but darn good. As far as whether or not he pre- or post-roast blends, I'm guessing the former. I just can't see him whipping up a batch of EC in green to sell as green if the roasted EC he sells was post-roast blended - the results wouldn't even come close to each other, if for no other reason than the percentages of each component bean would be tough to match.

In fact, as a note on the Espresso Classico, I don't even try to "match" the results achieved professionally. I'll try to hit about the same degree of roast, but that's all I try for. I'll roast up a pound and enjoy it as it is, then I'll adjust the roast-profile to better suit my palate. To me, that's one of the things I enjoy most about home-roasting - tweaking my method and seeing what I get as a result.