Book 1 / Parts 3-5 — Getting Started, Tasting & Practice

Theory only gets you so far. At some point you have to actually weigh the beans, pour them into a hot chamber, and listen for the first crack — and then taste what you made.

This is the part of Book 1 where the book leaves the lecture hall and walks into the roastery. Parts 1 and 2 explain what coffee is and what happens chemically inside the bean. Parts 3, 4 and 5 are where you put on an apron, set up a station, and start producing actual coffee you'll drink the next morning.

Thirteen chapters — Ch 10 through Ch 22 — span equipment selection, workspace setup, your first step-by-step roast, the full roast-level spectrum, palate development, simple home cupping, roast logging, consistency drills, safety, and where to go next. It is the most hands-on stretch of the entire book, and the section students at Tasse come back to most often.

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Chapter 10 · Equipment

You Don't Need an Expensive Roaster to Start

Chapter 10 lays out every realistic entry point in honest detail. A stainless steel colander over a pot of boiling water — the stovetop method — costs almost nothing and roasts 50–75g batches by steam. A modified electric popcorn popper, $20 to $40, is the most-recommended beginner tool in home-roasting communities because convection heat produces remarkably even roasts in seven to ten minutes.

One step up sits the heat-gun-and-bowl method: $40–$80 of hardware and a lot of arm work for 100–150g batches with real temperature control. And in the $300–$1,000 band the purpose-built home roasters — the Fresh Roast SR-540 and SR-800, the Behmor 2000, the Gene Cafe CBR-101 — give you digital displays, saved profiles, first-crack buzzers, and the consistency you need to actually compare one roast against the next.

The chapter also covers the accessories that every method shares: a 0.1g kitchen scale, a timer, an infrared thermometer if your roaster lacks one, a cooling tray, airtight storage with one-way valves, and a notebook. Most of it costs less than a single bag of specialty espresso.

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Chapter 12 · Your First Roast

A Step-by-Step Walkthrough — Exactly How I Teach It

Chapter 12 is the one most readers tell us they re-read before every early roast. It walks the entire arc — choosing green coffee that will work with you (Brazilian Santos or a Colombian Huila, not an exotic Ethiopian natural for your very first batch), weighing precisely, setting up a "roast station" within arm's reach, preheating to 177–204°C (350–400°F), and then the six numbered steps from charge to drop.

The walkthrough names what you will actually see, smell and hear at each phase: the temperature drop as cool green beans hit the hot chamber, the quiet 3–5 minute heat-absorption phase, the dramatic green-to-yellow-to-tan colour shift around the six-minute mark, the deepening to cinnamon-brown with chocolate aromas, and then — somewhere between seven and ten minutes in — the snapping sound of first crack itself.

It also covers the part most online tutorials skip: cooling fast (three to four minutes, vigorously, in a colander over a fan), letting the beans degas for 12–24 hours, and only then brewing a cup.

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Chapter 13 · Roast Levels

Light, Medium, Medium-Dark, Dark — and Why There's No Hierarchy

Chapter 13 maps the spectrum with the four anchors every roaster needs to know cold: light (dropped at or just after first crack, dry surface, 12–14% weight loss, bright and origin-forward), medium (1–3 minutes after first crack, 14–16%, balanced — the safe choice when you're roasting for other people), medium-dark (approaching second crack, first oil spots, 16–18%, bittersweet chocolate and reduced acidity), and dark (at or past second crack, oily surface, 18–20%+, where roast flavour overtakes origin character entirely).

The chapter is firm on a point the specialty world often forgets: a perfectly executed dark roast is not "worse" than a perfectly executed light. They serve different purposes. Light shows you what the farmer grew. Dark shows you what the roaster decided. The best roast level is the one you actually want to drink — and the same Brazilian coffee can legitimately be roasted light for filter customers and dark for espresso customers at the same café.

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Part 4 · Tasting

Learning to Taste What You Just Roasted

Part 4 is the section that separates roasters who improve from those who plateau. Chapter 15 opens with the distinction that changes everything: taste is what your tongue detects (sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami); flavour is taste plus aroma plus mouthfeel — and roughly 80% of what we call flavour is actually smell. It's why pinching your nose during a sip drains the coffee of character, and why professionals slurp loudly: spraying coffee across the palate aerosolises aromatics straight up the retronasal passage.

The chapter then builds a palate methodically with five paired exercises — light versus dark roast of the same coffee, Ethiopia versus Brazil at the same level, ladders of sugar-water and lemon-juice to isolate sweetness and acidity, and a deliberately over-extracted cup to teach what bitterness shouldn't taste like.

Chapter 17 then strips professional cupping down to what fits on a kitchen table: 12g of coffee per cup, 150ml of water just off boil at 93°C (200°F), a four-minute steep, break the crust with a spoon, skim, slurp. It is the single fairest way to compare two roasts side by side, and it requires nothing you don't already own.

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Chapter 19 · The Roast Log

If You Can't Repeat It, You Didn't Really Roast It

Part 5 opens with the single highest-leverage habit in the entire book: writing down what you just did. Chapter 19 makes the case bluntly — if a batch was excellent but you can't repeat it tomorrow, you didn't really roast it, you got lucky.

The chapter lists the essential fields (date and ambient conditions, green coffee origin and lot, batch size, charge temperature, time-temperature readings every 30–60 seconds, turning-point, first-crack time and temperature, drop time and temperature, total roast time, weight-loss percentage, and tasting notes 12–24 hours later) and the three tool tiers that match different levels of seriousness: a paper notebook, a Google Sheets template with automatic weight-loss math, or Artisan software wired to a thermometer for full curve capture.

The point isn't to fill every field. The point is that one logged roast is a data point, and twenty logged roasts is a learning curve you can actually see — temperatures stabilising, weight loss tightening, cupping notes growing more specific.

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Chapter 21 · Safety, and Chapter 22 · What's Next

Stay Present, Stay Safe, Then Keep Going

The book closes with two short but important chapters. Chapter 21 is the safety brief every home roaster needs once and refers back to forever: chaff is your number one fire risk and must be emptied after every batch; if flames appear in the drum, do not dump the beans into open air — kill the heat, kill the airflow, starve the fire of oxygen; keep a Class B/C extinguisher within arm's reach; ventilate properly; and never touch a drum that was roasting in the last fifteen minutes.

Chapter 22 then opens the door to what comes after Book 1 — SCA Foundations training, the Q Grader credential, origin trips, blending experiments, and for readers who feel the pull of going professional, the bridge into Book 2: The Roasting Bible — The Science of Coffee Roasting.

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Who This Part of the Book Is For

Parts 3 through 5 are for you if you're done reading about roasting and ready to do it. If you've bought (or are about to buy) your first piece of equipment, want a calm voice in your ear during the first three or four batches, and want a tasting and logging routine that will compound into real skill — this is the section to live in.

It is also the section to revisit. Most readers we hear from re-read Chapter 12 before each early roast, return to Chapter 13 when deciding how dark to go, and use the log template in Chapter 19 as a permanent reference.

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Wing Yuen is the founder of Tasse Coffee Roastery in Shinjuku, Tokyo, an SCA Authorised Trainer (Coffee Skills Program) and Q Grader, and the author of The Roasting Bible Book 1 and Book 2. Tasse Coffee runs SCA Foundation, Intermediate and Professional courses in Tokyo.