Just joined SCAE as creator of the certification system for coffee roasters

A few months ago Filip Åkerblom asked me on behalf of SCAE’s education committee to continue the work he had done the last 5 years on SCAE’s exam system for coffee roasters. Teaching coffee roasting at London School of Coffee since 2007 I feel that its right up my alley.

My approach has been getting completely confident about the basics. The basics is the best point of departure for beginners. But the basics is also the best place to start if you would like to avoid getting lost in all the loose claims running around in the coffee roasting community.

So my teaching is quite basic. Basic stuff is good for universal claims. The more advanced stuff is common sense and experience with roasting, cupping, roasting, cupping, roasting, cupping….. on one or few machines. But this is a quite specific process to the equipment you happen to use. Where it is installed, ventilation pipe size, bends, the climate and so on. Getting universal claims on the more advanced parts of roasting is something I hope to get with the help of sensory science coupled with multivariate statistics. I have already initiated this on Rolighedsvej 30 and will keep you updated (see this blog post).

Filip and I have been working on the roasting part of SCAE’s new CDS system that will be introduced at SCAE’s exhibition in Nice. Hope to see you there.

With my new position in SCAE I’m looking forward to do help out making coffee roasting more available and high quality more consistent. Seriously. It is badly needed. I really hurts me how much bad coffee is consumed around here. It’s not rocket science to do good coffee. A few good rules of thumb, a few pennies more and quality goes up. And perfection is just what you pursue for the rest of your life. I mean, the fun stuff.