Why coffee roasters should test everything and hold nothing as sacred with Rob Hoos

I actually love roasting live with people.

Yeah.

And then other machines too, like the rowist, it's ridiculously easy.

I can just literally drive it from my computer if somebody's new to the rowist and so I'll be on zoom and then driving their roaster for them.

The assumption is that you have to be, you're a roasting, so you have to be in person.

It's a physical product.

We're in a factory making green brown.

So like you have to be there.

So I get why it wouldn't be intuitive to, to think in that way.

What have you learned from doing exclusively remote consulting about roasters specifically?

The machines are the people,

the people.

Most people feel really alone and like they're the only ones with the questions and these types of questions.

And most people ask the exact same questions.

Yeah.

What are the three most common questions you get?

I'll do the three most common questions, but then I'll tell you one of the most common things I hear people say.

The first thing I want to say is what they say.

And it is that most people are really apologetic when they first get on with me because they're not roasting really high end coffees.

And I have to say, well, most people don't.

And they're like, well, what do you mean most people don't? And it's like, well, you know, the backbone of most people's coffee businesses tend to be blends and darker roasts and sometimes even more affordable coffees.

And so you're really not alone in that.

As a consultant, I primarily work with people who are doing stuff like that and occasionally will be working on their really high-end specialty coffees and stuff like that.

And so I think people feel like a lot of aloneness or like they're doing something wrong because their market won't let them have coffees the way that they think they should.

And you could probably speak to this a lot more, but the very casual thing that I'll usually say to people is, you know, just remember when you're seeing people promote stuff on social media, it doesn't mean that that's all that they're selling.