Goal: Understand how roastables work as physical representations of your coffees to manage different preparations from the same green bean inventory.
Prerequisites: You have bean lots added to your inventory in RoastLog.
What's a Roastable?
A roastable is a physical representation of your coffees and serves as a useful way to manage any coffee that is prepared in different ways within your roasting operation. While your bean lots represent the green coffee inventory you purchase, roastables represent the actual coffees you'll be roasting and serving.
Why We Need Both Bean Lots and Roastables
Think of it this way: you might purchase a single bean lot of Ethiopia Amaro Gayo, but you could roast it multiple ways for different purposes. With RoastLog, I can manage that green coffee as a single inventory item (the bean lot), but create multiple roastables from it.
For example, you might create:
Amaro Gayo SO (single origin pour over)
Amaro Gayo Iced (iced coffee preparation)
Each preparation has a distinct flavor profile and requires different roast profiles, but they both draw from the same green coffee inventory.
Active Roastables found on the Roastables page
Common Roastable Scenarios
Roastables are perfect for managing coffees prepared in different ways:
Light vs. darker roasts of the same origin
Pre-roast blends
Iced coffee preparations
Immersion vs. pour over profiles
How Roastables Connect to Your Workflow
When you create roastables, they become the building blocks for your roast queue in RoastLogger. Each roastable can have its own profile history, shrinkage settings, and recipes. This system allows you to maintain consistent quality while accurately tracking how much green coffee inventory you're using for each specific coffee offering.
The beauty of this system is that whether you're running a single-origin roastable or a complex blend, RoastLog automatically adjusts your green coffee inventory levels based on exactly what you're roasting.
Active three-component Roastable Blend
Accurate inventory for pre-blends
RoastLog conveniently provides a way to manage pre-roast blend recipes. You can record each blend component within a given Roastable as well as the proportionate amount for your blend.
The added benefit is that your green inventory levels for each individual coffee component is adjusted by the correct amount based on the batch size.
Shrinkage: setting default value
Whether managing a single origin or pre-roast blended Roastable, it's possible to assign a default shrinkage value. Shrinkage is intended to represent the mass lost during roasting -primarily due to moisture loss - as a percentage.
Auto-calculate batch end mass based on shrinkage value
Populating this field for each Roastable enables RoastLog to automatically calculate end mass for your roasts based on the "approximate" shrinkage percentage. If you leave the field empty, the actual shrinkage percentage will be calculated based on the end mass manually entered after each roast. The most accurate way to record shrinkage is to record your start/end mass, but using the Roastable shrinkage values provides the convenience of having end mass calculated and appended to your roast details for you automatically.