Friday, January 13, 2023

How To Roast Coffee with Scott Rao - Jan 13th 2023

Course Launch: How To Roast Coffee

BH Unlimited Update, Jan 13th 2023

A big Happy New Year to you all! Here's how the brand new BH x Scott Rao roasting course came together and what's in store for all our BH Unlimited subscribers:

After MICE and the WBC came to town towards the end of 2022, Barista Hustle teamed up with Scott Rao — the world's preeminent coffee roasting consultant — in a Melbourne film studio, and on location at the Small Batch and Code Black roasteries. During this long awaited collaboration (we've been talking about this for literally years) we created 40 new videos for a brand new online course called How to Roast Coffee (with Scott Rao). Since then we've been busy editing the films and putting together the written lesson components of the first chapters of the course. And now, we're delighted to announce … We have the first instalment of this awesome new course ready for you to dive into.

As usual, this course will be released in biweekly instalments beginning with the prologue called Getting Set Up. The course and all its subsequent updates can be purchased upfront with lifetime access, with links to new lessons delivered into your inbox every two weeks until the final lessons are published in mid 2023. And of course, BH Unlimited subscribers have advanced access to each new lesson as the course progresses and can head in there now and check out the first three lessons.

To begin with, How to Roast Coffee provides you with advice on how to choose a roasting space and how to set up your own roastery.

In the next instalment, we'll be giving you advice on fire safety, pollution control, and green storage. Then, as the course progresses, we focus on tuning your roasting machine — everything from finding the optimal RPM and airflow, to ensuring your burners are working safely and efficiently.

Scott Rao's five books about brewing, espresso and coffee roasting, together with his frequent masterclasses and popular coffee blog, have reshaped the way all baristas and roasters approach their coffee.

Who is Scott Rao?

If you've been living under a Raock, and you're unaware of who exactly Scott Rao is, here's some biographical info about the person who, in our opinion, has shaped the way folks roast and brew more than anyone else in our industry.

Please note: You may be surprised to hear that Scott's surname is actually pronounced 'Ray-owe' as in 'ray' of sunshine and 'to owe' someone a huge debt of gratitude.

Scott started his first cafe-roastery in Amherst, MA when he was 22. That business quickly became an institution, serving well over 1000 customers per day whilst tripling the sales volume of the Starbucks down the street. Scott's next career move took him on a fact-finding mission in the New Zealand coffee industry. He then returned to the US to open a restaurant and coffee roastery inspired by his travels in the antipodes. Scott later founded a pioneering cafe in Montreal that influenced coffee making worldwide.

Upon selling his second business, Scott began writing books about coffee-making in the hopes of helping roasters and baristas become more educated and systematic in their approach to coffee. Scott parlayed those books into a consulting career and now spends his time consulting for coffee roasters around the world, teaching the world's most advanced roasting masterclasses, and designing next-generation coffee equipment.

In the last month, Scott launched Prodigal, a new coffee roasting company with chef-turned-roaster Mark Benedetto. Prodigal is based in Boulder, Colorado. (FYI, due to immense popular demand, they sold out of all their coffee within 24 hours of opening their webshop — but trust us, it'll be worth the wait once they restock.)

We hope you love this course as much as we loved making it. We'll be back in two weeks with your next update.

Quick links

Over the last few weeks, coffee fermentation consultant and podcaster Lucia Solis released two new episodes with Vava Angwenyi, author of Coffee Milk Blood and founder of social enterprise VAVA COFFEE.

Professor Steven Abbott released his new virtual coffee roasting app the other day. Here's a white paper Professor Abbott prepared for us, explaining how it all works. Also, the good professor appeared in a delightful new podcast series by James Harper where he discusses the science of milk foams.

Tim Wendelboe has been publishing a series of extended Instagram posts summing up the changes he saw in 2022 and predictions about what lies ahead. Here's the first in the series. He's done 5 of them so far!

Coffee Education — Without the Advertising

BH provides a level of detail about coffee production that platforms like Youtube are unable to obtain, because we are a subscription service — our members pay us to produce the best, most detailed information for them, rather than creating videos that get the most views for an advertiser.

At BH we never do ads for other company's products on our website. There's no product placement in any of our courses, newsletters or blog posts. Our only income comes from what you pay for your subscriptions.

When you see machinery or coffee gear mentioned in any of our educational material, or featured in our course videos, we have chosen to use that equipment because we like using it, because we think it's historically significant in the evolution of the espresso machine, or because it shows you something you need to see about modern coffee culture. It's as simple as that.