Espresso Roast Quality Control As A Risk Management Tool

What if I told you that investing in your palate as a roast master is actually a way to minimize business risks?

And that performing organized quality control has much more to do with risk management than with tasting coffee?

Even that famous exercise from the CQI Q Arabica Grader Course—where you had to identify basic flavors and their concentrations—is the base of the base, and not just some boring, useless, impossible to pass exercise?

Let’s talk about espresso quality control.

When we are just starting in coffee, and take our first sensory skills classes, or attend first cuppings, taste amazing coffees, discuss the tones of flower notes, and if it is lavender or rose, and when we tasted jasmine in coffee for the first time - we decide “I am gonna be working with coffee”, thinking that day to day operations will be mainly it.

And don’t get me wrong, you end up tasting lots of beautiful coffees. But you start looking at them under a completely different lens:

• "Can we afford it?"

• "Will the client actually buy it?"

• "How does it fit into our lineup?"

Your main focus ends up being the coffee that you would have probably ignored when you were merely "a coffee lover." The smooth and silky, basic daily espresso. Nothing special to describe there—it is not a Gesha to shock you with florals, and there is no advanced processing involved. Usually, it is just a clean natural or washed coffee—something that your father or mother would gladly order somewhere outside without any interest in knowing the name of the roaster or the variety, and simply comment: "It was a good coffee."

So, to achieve that "it was a good coffee" coming from a regular, unbiased consumer—tasting your regular coffee made on a machine that you cannot control, brewed by a barista who was recently hired and given only basic instructions—is mainly the job of roastery quality control.

I am not saying you are solely responsible for that outcome—not at all, we all know there are many variables involved.

But I firmly believe that roasting coffee in a way that is "fool-proof," easy to brew, and tastes good under a variety of real-world conditions is hard work. It is also work that has to be done if a roastery wants to be successful in retaining customers.

Why QC Is Customer Retention

Retaining more customers means spending less time visiting cafes to mitigate problematic roasts, re-adjusting espressos every time you tweak a profile, or dealing with unhappy clients who cannot dial in the coffee to taste the way it is supposed to taste.

If your coffee is easy to brew, it does the customer retention work for you. That leaves you free to focus on other things that are important for growing the business. That’s why quality control has much more to do with risk management than with coffee tasting.

So when does quality control actually enter the scene, and what do I mean by it?

Quality control is a set of measures and procedures that guarantees the client receives coffee optimally roasted for their specific purposes—aligning both with the vision of the roaster and the customer. It ensures that the quality of the roast and extraction remains stable or incrementally improves throughout the usage of that green stock (assuming the client maintains stability on their end, or communicates changes so you can adapt).

Designing the Experience from the Start

Quality control starts with an idea of what you want your customer to experience. You are constructing an experience from scratch and looking for a coffee that fits that precise idea.

Sometimes, you stumble upon a coffee and think: "That would be an amazing espresso for the client X." Sometimes, you work long-term with a producer and want to showcase their harvest year after year with all the seasonal changes involved. Other times, a client comes to you with a specific brief, and you start searching for a coffee under their conditions (price, flavor profile, volume needed).

When green coffee samples arrive, a good approach is to roast them using the specific profile you have set up for your test espressos—regardless of whether you are going to test the sample on an espresso machine or only have enough sample weight for a cupping bowl.

Why?

We are looking for an espresso, right? So there is no need to find out that a coffee has delicate tropical fruit notes when roasted for cupping, if what actually matters for your menu is a smooth body and a silky texture. We want to know how that coffee behaves in espresso, so we test it accordingly.

The next step is comparing that sample to your current production roast of a similar coffee, as well as your sample roast on the espresso machine, to see if it actually has what it takes.

With experience, you learn to see the potential of the bean and see what can be improved by tweaking the roast curve or using a different system (a gas drum roaster vs. a convection roaster, for example)—and recognizing what is simply not there, because no matter how you roast it, it is never going to taste like oranges, if the flavoru is not there genetically.

Setting Up Production Quality Control

When performing regular quality control on a production scale, these are non-negotiable procedures for your framework:

• Never skip tasting coffee as espresso: Especially if you have access to different types of espresso machines (bonus points for testing how your profiles perform on fully automatic machines).

• Do a double-check (espresso and cupping): Note that cupping espresso roasts differs from cupping filter samples. You expect the coffee to behave differently and have a different "image" in the cup when it is an espresso roast, so you are looking for specific structural parameters and solubility.

• Cup double-coded (blind): so your expectations don’t get in the way

• then - cup with roasting data in front of you: connecting the dots, conclusions, and programming adjustments for the future roasts

• Cup alongside other people: It doesn't matter if they have extensive sensory experience or not.

• Compare your roasts with other roasters regularly: Always look for people who do it better, and study how they make the coffee taste the way you would like yours to taste.

• Don’t judge an espresso roast only 24 hours or 3 days after roasting. Your client is almost never serving coffee that was roasted yesterday, and your quality control needs to show you how that roast behaves with extra resting time. It does not mean you have to let the coffee rest till it is perfect before selling it (although some roasters do that extra step) - but you need to make sure that with the roasting style you are practicing, the coffee is aging well.