Home Coffee Roaster Competition 2016

[Andy]

Thanks for that, I didn't know the results were posted.

Yes, I might have to change the current description in BeanBay from: "Works well in milk, as a long black, as a short black and as a filter coffee"
to something like: "...and works REALLY REALLY well as a filter coffee"


Gold was a shock, more so after seeing some of the crazy coffees that were pulling medals before it was announced but I know the Sidamo Ardi is an amazing coffee that we drink at home and at work nearly every day out of the Brazen and have done for months so we know it well. We also scored a bronze medal in the Espresso category with the Ardi too. This bean rocks!

[coffee_cranks]

Thanks to all everyone for making this happen, especially Andy, it was a great concept to roast an unknown green bean for three different categories with only enough green beans for one practice roast that I profiled a couple of weeks prior. Would love to have been at the event over the past week looked like lots of fun. Congratulations to all the other winners.

[Paolo]

Congratulations to all...especially you, Coffee_Cranks!

[TL1000s]

Congratulations to all in the competition. A special congratulations to Andy for the Pour over filter Gold, woohoo. Congrats to Coffee_cranks for the overall win. Special thank you to Andy and the Coffeesnobs crew, for the hard work involved and for the opportunity to be part of this great event. Well done guys.

[Andy]

Well I'm halfway home,a few more Sydney hours wait for the connecting flight. It's been another amazing golden bean week, great people and great coffee everyday.

Thanks to coffee judge Emma who sat too close to me shuffling the home roaster score sheets this morning at the port Mac airport and offered to help, I can happily say that the 180 score sheets are collated and ready for posting tomorrow. It was a great use of wait time.

So, expect judges feedback to vary from great to ummm errr lazy. It really is a little hit and miss and short of hitting them with a big stick it will always be a bit like this.

If you got a very low score then I would expect they really didn't like it, as a rule they are all fair and can only judge what was put in front of them. If you did get a low score then the best way to improve is to use a wider range of people to try your roasts. If you only ever get feedback from family then they might all swing the same way.

Try and hook up with another CS'r, maybe swap roasts of the same bean and give each other a score. The more you do these sorts of exercises the better your knowledge and you will develop a better understanding of what others expect to see in the cup. You can even send some beans too me if you get stuck, I dont have much spare time but I'm happy offer some tips if its one of our green beans and I know how I would roast it.

One thing is for sure, low score are great motivation to improve.

If you scored high then keep doing what you are doing!

Of course and the end of the day, if you love what you are roasting then it doesn't really matter what the judges say.

Well done all, it's always exciting to see these get judged as I know some of you will one day be commercial roasters and this is a great apprenticeship.

Enjoy the journey!

[artman]

Congrats to all especially the winners, what an awesome accolade for a snobber!

Sounds like it is a fun event.

Must try entering one year and see what the experts think of my efforts, would be very interesting.

Cheers

[prloring]

Just a quick word of encouragement to all who entered and may be a little bummed with their scores...
We tasted commercially roasted coffees all week, some were terrible, some were mind blowing, but know this, my whole table was very pleasantly surprised with the quality of the home roasted entrants. Many of the coffees were on par/competing or even better than the commercial cups we'd tasted previously. As for your scores; we all calibrated at the start of the week, the score legend accros the top of the page is exactly how we judged. If you got 5's, meaning average, that means average for General Cafes as we know them - so your scoring what we would expect to taste from your normal cafe...eg. your beans were tasting like cafe beans. If you scored 6's then it was good, don't down play that...think...Q. "hey, what's their coffee like?" A."Yeah, it's good". 7's means "hey, can we go there for coffee, it's very good".

So don't be too hard on yourselves when reading your score sheets, learn from them, get more of those beans and roast them again to see if you can positively change the flavours, that's all part of the fun/frustration/reward of roasting coffee!!

[acesandeights97]

out of interest how does the scoring work? 2 judges per sample and a score out of 33? 35? 40? And do they just pick a number they think corresponds or are there criteria?

thanks for all your work to make this happen Andy. Looking forward to my feedback!

[themurphs]

Thanks to everyone for putting on the competition,

I was just wondering what the "Golden Bean" PDF represents, you said there was 180 home roaster entries, there is 30 results on the sheet.
Is this the top 30 entries?

My entry is on that PDF, so I thought I would ask.

Looking forward to my feedback, good to see the one I concentrated on scored higher (not a filtered coffee household!).

Thanks again, and I will be competing again next year.

The Murphs.

[Andy]

Just a quick word of encouragement to all who entered and may be a little bummed with their scores...
We tasted commercially roasted coffees all week, some were terrible, some were mind blowing, but know this, my whole table was very pleasantly surprised with the quality of the home roasted entrants. Many of the coffees were on par/competing or even better than the commercial cups we'd tasted previously. As for your scores; we all calibrated at the start of the week, the score legend accros the top of the page is exactly how we judged. If you got 5's, meaning average, that means average for General Cafes as we know them - so your scoring what we would expect to taste from your normal cafe...eg. your beans were tasting like cafe beans. If you scored 6's then it was good, don't down play that...think...Q. "hey, what's their coffee like?" A."Yeah, it's good". 7's means "hey, can we go there for coffee, it's very good".

So don't be too hard on yourselves when reading your score sheets, learn from them, get more of those beans and roast them again to see if you can positively change the flavours, that's all part of the fun/frustration/reward of roasting coffee!!

Excellent post Peter. I wish I had wrote it.

you said there was 180 home roaster entries

Nah Murphs, I said:

making, delivering, tasting and scoring 180 home roaster coffees all made to competition standards.

...and...

I can happily say that the 180 score sheets are collated and ready for posting tomorrow

30 home roaster entries in 3 categories = 90 coffees entered and each of those equate to 2 cups (for two judges) and two score sheets = 180

The logistics of this is huge really.

An example...

Espresso -
Staff in the "engine room" get the coffee out of a box, write the code on 2 score sheets, it then gets handed to the next spare barista who might pour 3 or 4 shots until they get the grind right to hit the extraction ratio. Every dose is weighed as is every pour to keep consistency.

Once the barista is happy with the shot a "runner" takes the two coffees out to a pair of waiting judges. They taste it and score it based on sweetness, acidity, body, flavours etc (the criteria varies with each category) and discuss what they found. Sometimes they will adjust their scores upon reflection, but typically their first impression is pretty right. When finished another runner clears the empty cups.

Category judges oversee the whole process, their role is to taste very high or very low scoring coffees to ensure that they were scored fair based on a wider "room calibration". Lots of judging pairs will also use the category judge to make sure they are in sync, more so if they have just started the day, changed categories (ie: gone from filter to espresso) etc.

Category judges collect the score sheets, make sure the number spread between the two isn't too big and if it is then they will sometimes "order a remake" to make sure. Another runner takes the completed score sheets to the office and they are then entered in the system.

Espresso was all served in beautiful competition sized Ancap cups supplied by Casa Espresso. These were washed and cycled many, many times and left on top of the machines to get to the same temperature. Antony might be able to say how many cups were used but I know it was a lot.

Latte and Filter categories were all served in competition sized Cast Away 6oz paper cups.

It's a huge team of people to make this happen and to try and ensure that it is fair, anonymous and every coffee gets its best chance to shine. There were runners everywhere, taking empty cups, filling water jugs, green apple slices and bread and moving tons of coffees back and forward. Unless you see the process in action it's hard to comprehend just what a massive task it is. Might have been 5 x 3 group espresso machines and Compak grinders along with 8 Brazens and a Compak deli grinder, dozens of scales, 100's of milk jugs, 30 odd staff and 80 odd judges (at a guess) not to mention a huge RO water system and filters everywhere.

With all the commercial entries and accounting for all the shots poured dialing the coffees in there might have been close to 10,000 shots poured last week!

(sorry for the long post, I got a bit carried away)

Tonight... as I was still on the roaster and Paula was still packing orders, Tiana got roped into stuffing envelopes after school. All the home roaster entries went in the post and you should get them soon. We re-printed the same address that your entry beans were posted to. So if you have any questions after you get your score sheets back post 'em up and I'll answer best I can, if I can.

[Andy]

I was also going to mention...

To put the scoring in perspective, in the commercial categories the lowest score I saw was an 8, the highest 35 and most coffees fell into the low to mid 20's with high 20's rare.

...so as a spreadsheet, all you home roasters rocked!

[themurphs]

Thanks for the info Andy,

Might have to go the second bag next year, I was down to my last 100g when I sealed the bags.

The beans themselves were very enjoyable,

I aim for improvement next year.
Murphs

[TL1000s]

Thank you Andy and Peter for your comments. It has certainly given me a new appreciation for what goes on and the hard work involved. Thank you again.

[prloring]

No worries TL100s, its a sight to behold, definitely a must see.

So just to recap; scores are out of 40. (milk based was a score out of 10 for each Sweetness, Flavour, Aftertaste, Total Balance...can't remember what espresso was). So you have to get 4x 10/10 to get a perfect score...almost impossible. Following on from what Andy said, the highest score on our table was a 35 (3x9 and an 8). I scored one 32, one 28, a halfdozen 25-27, countless 20-25s and the lowest being a 13.

I was pretty devo last year thinking I got 'average' or 'middle of the road' scores, but after seeing how it all goes down and the spread of the scores accross the competition I feel a whole lot more positive about my last years scores and cannot wait to see my scores from this year!
Another thing worth noting is that we couldn't give half scores this year, numerous times we wanted to give 6.5 or 5.5 but had to round down when we couldn't justify giving a whole point higher. Just the way it is.

Peter.

[NickC]

OK third time lucky to post a reply and not somehow stuff it up and lose everything!

Thanks to everyone who played a part in organising the competition, it sounds like a huge amount of work. I got the scoring sheets in the mail today and it was really interesting to see the comments - the judges really have a knack for describing flavours. Has inspired me to pay more attention to what I'm doing with each roast.

Congrats to the other winners and to Andy for his win as well.

I wrote a lot more the previous 2 attempts but I'm going to leave it at that for now and see if this posts! Come on computer - you can do it!