You are only as good as your last roast!

My ex Bossman, Toby Smith of Toby's Estate fame ever said to me and I quote, "you are only as good as your last roast!" A simple line but one I hold on to dearly for 10 years now. In every roast and every cupping session later, so true are those words! 

Eversince I run my own Roastery, I preached the same to my team of roaster/s too. For 7 years I only HAVE 'officially' one Nazrul Rusli co-roasting together, although I have trained a few others of our ex-employees, but now we have Ryan Quek too and I walk the talk that our every roast have to be better then the previous batch. I try to roast a few batches myself atleast one day per week and cupped all the samples roasted by the team when I am not roasting them. Every Tuesday, we invite everyone to cup together and that means my Co-partners, our Barista from all the shops, our wholesale partners and down to even our finance team. Topics are broadly discussed and the good, bad and ugly are also highlighted from each roast. 

More importantly than being consistent is the fact that "we are also only as good as how clean & well maintained our roasting machine are." We got the @loringroasters, a @buhlerroasters system, and 2 sample roasters of a @proaster.korea and the @ikawacoffee With all these machines, we do a daily after use cleaning, a weekly maintenance, a monthly strip down and a quarterly servicing, all by ourselves.

So barista out there who wants to be a coffee roaster, how well do you take care of your espresso machine and grinders? Coffee roasters, is it all about the sexy coffees that you buy and how light a roast you go? Have you ever gone down and dirty to scrub the scum yourselves, with debris entering your eyes and static electricity that shocked you?

Think again what makes a roasted coffees taste good. You are only as good as your last roast,and as great as the last time you clean the roasting machine.