US Roaster’s Cup Interview 

Andrew took 5th in the roasters category at us coffee championships, so we sat down to learn more about what is involved with a roasting competition.

Q: What is the US Coffee Roasting Championships (USRC)?

A: Typically, the US Coffee Championships occurs each year, and roasters is one of the competitions (there are also competitions for baristas, coffee brewing, cup tasting, coffee cocktails, and latte art). Due to Covid, this championship was actually the postponed 2020 championship finals that I qualified for in Feb 2020. The process usually involves several qualifying events: preliminaries, qualifiers, then finals. So this was the culmination of a very extended competition season.

Q: So what was involved in the actual competition?
A: The roasting competition has a lot of different tasks: green coffee grading, sample roasting and cupping, roast planning, and final production roasts. Everything is done on site, and the green coffee was provided at the start of the competition. So that means gathering a lot of data while roasting on a machine I wasn’t super familiar with.

We were scored based on the quality of our green grading, which involved looking at the attributes of the green beans (moisture content, density, a very detailed defect count, and bean size distribution)  accuracy of the roast plan (we had to describe our roast and flavors we wanted to get out of the coffee, based on our sample roasts) and final production roast (scored based on: aroma, flavor, aftertaste, acidity, body, sweetness, balance, and how well our description in our roast plan matched the cup).

Q: That sounds like a lot to do! Did you have a favorite part of the competition?
A: Yes, it was busy! I actually also competed in the cup tasting competition as well, so it was a lot. The whole competition was really a great time, a lot of learning (It was my first season competing) There were several other roasters from the Portland/Vancouver area, so it was great spending time with them and talking through plans/approaches to each step.

Q: Any plans to compete again?
A: Yes. 2023 finals are in Portland, so I’m really hoping to qualify again and hopefully be able to do well while enjoying a little bit of home court advantage!


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