Roast Coach is an app that watches your coffee roast in real time, logs everything that happens, and uses AI to turn that data into coaching that makes your next roast better than the last one.

Roasting knowledge is hard to capture.

Every roast generates insight. Without a system, most of it evaporates before the next session.

Without Roast Coach

You roast, you taste, you remember some of it. Maybe you scribble notes. But the details — the exact moment you adjusted fan, the shape of the temperature curve, what the ROR was doing when you hit first crack — are gone.

  • Temperature data isn't captured or is lost in a CSV you never look at
  • Good decisions aren't connected to the cup quality they produced
  • Each roast starts from scratch — no accumulated intelligence
  • You forget what worked 3 roasts ago on the same bean

With Roast Coach

Every second of every roast is logged. Every decision you make, every suggestion the AI gives, how you responded, and — days later — how the coffee tasted. All of it feeds a system that learns what works.

  • Full temperature curves, fan/power changes, event markers saved automatically
  • Cupping scores link every decision to the result in the cup
  • AI synthesizes it all and coaches you in real time during the next roast
  • Per-bean profiles remember what worked for each specific coffee

What can AI do that a spreadsheet can't?

Logging tools already exist. The difference is what happens with the data after it's captured.

It reads every number in real time.

A roast on the Fresh Roast SR800 takes about 7 minutes. In that time, the temperature changes every second, the rate of rise shifts constantly, and there are maybe a dozen moments where a small adjustment would make a difference.

No human can watch a temperature stream, calculate the rate of change, compare it to the ideal curve for this specific bean, recall what happened last time, and formulate advice — all in 10 seconds. The AI can.

What it's actually doing: Every 10 seconds, the AI reads your current temperature, rate of change, fan and power levels, where you are in the roast phases, what happened in your best past roasts of this bean, and delivers a one-line coaching message.
What the AI sees every 10 seconds

Live Data

Bean Temp342°F and climbing
Rate of Rise18°F/min, declining
Fan / Power7 / 6
PhaseMid-Maillard

Memory

Best past roast4.5/5★ — hit FC at 6:18
Ideal ROR here16–20°F/min
What workedFan drop at 330°F
What didn'tLate power reduction
AI Output
"ROR at 18 is right on target. Hold fan at 7 — you're tracking your best Costa Rica roast."

It connects decisions to results.

This is the part that matters most. When you taste your coffee days later and score it, that score flows back to every decision made during the roast. The AI connects cause to effect across time.

Dropped fan to 6 at 3:30 on a Costa Rica natural and got a 5/5 cup? The system remembers. Did the same thing on a Kenya washed and got a 3/5? It remembers that too. Over time, it builds per-bean intelligence: what actually works for each specific coffee.

Quality weighting: A 5-star roast shapes the coaching profile 8x more than a 1-star roast. The system naturally drifts toward whatever produces the best cups — no manual tuning needed.
How knowledge builds
🔥
Roast #1
Raw data captured. Generic coaching. No bean-specific history.
You cup it: 3/5
Score links to every decision. "Fan at 7 through Maillard → slightly underdeveloped."
🔥
Roast #2 (same bean)
AI now has context. Suggests longer development based on Roast #1 scores.
You cup it: 4.5/5
Higher score = higher influence. ROR targets start forming for this bean.
🧠
Roast #3+
Per-bean ROR profile active. Technique insights compare good vs poor roasts. Coaching is now personalized.

It synthesizes — not just recalls.

A logbook tells you what happened. A spreadsheet can plot a curve. But neither can look across five roasts of the same bean, weight each by quality, extract the pattern that separates your best cups from your worst, and turn that into a coaching message during your next roast.

That's what the AI does. It takes raw data and produces actionable insight: "your best Costa Rica roasts all had fan at 6 by 3:00, but you didn't drop fan until 4:15 today — consider going earlier." That kind of cross-session pattern recognition is where the value lives.

The AI's decision process
1
Read current state
BT, ROR, fan, power, phase, time elapsed
2
Compare to bean history
What did your best-scoring roasts look like at this exact moment?
3
Check technique patterns
What separates your high-scoring roasts from low-scoring ones?
4
Consider what you respond to
Which types of nudges do you actually act on? Which do you ignore?
5
Deliver one specific coaching message
"Drop fan to 6 now — your best cups had fan lower by this point."
💡

Think of it like a coach with a perfect memory.

Imagine a coach who watched every roast you've ever done, remembered every temperature, every adjustment, every cup score — and could instantly tell you: "the last time your Costa Rica was at 340°F with this ROR, you dropped fan too late and the cup was grassy. Drop it now." That's what Roast Coach does, except it never forgets and it gets better with every session.

Things people ask first.

Do I need to know about coffee roasting? +
No. The AI gives specific, actionable instructions — "drop fan to 7 now" — not vague advice. You'll learn the craft naturally by following the nudges and tasting the results. The system has built-in knowledge about temperatures, timing, and the roaster itself.
Does the AI control my roaster? +
Only if you want it to. In manual mode (the default), you make all the decisions — the AI just coaches. In auto-pilot mode (PID), the AI can control fan and power directly, following the temperature profile from your best past roast. You can override it at any time.
How is this different from Artisan or Cropster? +
Those are logging and visualization tools — they capture data beautifully. Roast Coach captures the same data, but then an AI synthesizes it across all your roasts, connects it to cup quality, and uses it to coach you in real time. The logging isn't the end goal — it's the input to a learning system.
How long until it's personalized to me? +
The AI is helpful from roast #1 thanks to built-in knowledge about the roaster and general roasting science. The personalization loop — per-bean ROR targets, technique insights, nudge calibration — kicks in after 3+ scored roasts of the same bean. The more you roast and cup, the smarter it gets.
What hardware do I need? +
A Fresh Roast SR800 roaster and an MS6514 thermocouple thermometer to measure bean temperature. Optional: RoastLink CORE (for WiFi control and auto-pilot mode) and an Elgato Stream Deck (for hands-free button control while roasting).
What data gets captured? +
Everything. Temperature readings every second, every fan and power change with timestamps, event markers (first crack, drop), every AI coaching message, whether you acted on each nudge, your post-roast reflections, and your cupping scores. A complete record of every roast you've ever done.

Want to see the system under the hood?

Now that you understand the concept, see exactly how the AI coaching engine, feedback loops, and knowledge capture work.

How It Works → See All Features