Homemade Roasting Tools

[expat]

I'm interested to know what homemade roasting tools you might have come up with that has helped speed your production.

For us about the only thing we've made are really nice, laminated bag tags, to make identification of our bags easy.

And I've made a spread sheet, my 'Roast Calculator', where I plug in all the orders I've got to fill and it spits out the weight of green beans I need to roast of each type of bean. It also tells me how many bags to label, which label (we've got 5 main coffees so including whole bean that gives us 10 front labels and 10 back since they are all individually bar coded), even the private label stuff, and how many of each bag to use (we have a Kraft bag--ground coffee--and a Black Patent bag--whole bean). I also have a place to enter the weight of roasted beans on hand and the Roast Calculator converts that to green weight, subtracts it from each type of bean I've got to roast, and gives me a net green bean weight for each type of bean to roast. If I can figure out the right formulas to use in Excel it will soon be able to, for instance, look at the fact that I need to roast 74,569 grams of Sidamo and tell me that on my 10kg roaster I need to do that in 8 roasts of 9,321 each.

I'm now working on a spread sheet where I input the roasted coffee on hand and it tells me the best way to use the coffee so that every bean gets used and in a bag (we don't like roasted coffee sitting around).

So how about you? What tools are you using to speed and improve your roasting?

 

[trk_koa]

I use something similar to your roast calculator. We do only roast to order and the orders are imported from our shopping cart into quick books. In quick books, I can use the sales by item detail report (set to accrual and the current date) to export everything I will need into Excel. I then have written a VBS macro for Excel that walks that data and populates a grid on a second sheet that details the counts of each bean type, roast level and ground vs whole bean. I can print that out and the top half is used to plan roasts and the bottom half plans the packaging.

This really helps avoid mistakes. I used to fill in the roast tally sheet based on looking at the orders myself and once in a while would miss something. This way QB and Excel are doing the math.