Training Log by Giorgio Bernardo - Getting started with our Roasting Philosophy

Continuous Learning that shapes our own Philosophy and Approach

Most of us start our journey by being curious on how interesting coffee is, by the time we discover, learn, and slowly digest how complex the world of coffee is, we tend to be more articulate about our thoughts from what we have learned and the more knowledge that we learn from others and learn from experience, the deeper we get to find what our philosophy and our approach is as a roaster, brewer, barista, coffee shop owner or as a coffee enthusiast.

How I develop my personal approach in roasting is by learning from other roasters through tasting their coffee and testing them out in different parameters, watching their podcasts, reading their books to learn the fundamentals and by gathering inputs on how unique their roasting approaches are plus a lot of homework (sample roasting, trial, and error, gathering feedback).

By collating these inputs, I then map out what taste characteristics I don’t want to have in our roasts by not altering the origin characteristics and what we want to achieve on the final product and then put this into the test by roasting. We cup our coffees a day after roasting by learning how the quality changes from Day 1 until the 2nd week. We learn from the changes, we learn from the roasting logs and we learn from the quality of the raw material itself.

We gather these learnings to create and plan out what we need to do to improve our next batch. We just started importing green coffee beans with a grade of 86 and up until last April 22 and it has led us to open a better perspective that the quality of the green coffee bean really dictates the quality of the rest of the chain and the quality of the final product. We also connect to our customers and different coffee individuals that are buying our coffees by asking them negative feedbacks and inputs so we can learn and grow.

Our philosophy is constant improvement and learning. The more detailed we analyze the formula of our roasting and brewing approach, the closer we get it to achieving our taste development goal.