Coffee | One Roast at a Time

Start Here

Coffee | One Roast at a Time is a practical home-roasting project built around the Gene Café CBR-301.

It is not a roasting school.
It is not expert instruction.
It is not coffee theatre.

It is a record of learning carefully in public — across 90+ roasts on one machine, one roaster, written down as it happened.

If you are new to the project

Start with the Guide. It captures what has stopped changing — the patterns that held up across many roasts and multiple coffees.

  1. What This Machine Actually Measures — what the Gene Café is and isn’t telling you
  2. From Time to Cup — how roast decisions connect to what ends up in the cup
  3. The Gene Café CBR-301 — What Has Stopped Changing — the stable learning after 20+ roasts
  4. Method & Assumptions — how this project frames evidence and draws conclusions

If you own a Gene Café CBR-301

These are the most practical pages for someone who already has the machine and wants to understand it better.

  1. What This Machine Actually Measures
  2. Quick Start — A Good-Enough Roast for Clean Naturals
  3. What Has Stopped Changing
  4. TRT Decision Tool (Beta)
  5. Observations After 20 Roasts

If you are here for the roast notes

The notes are the working record of the project. They are not recipes. They show what happened, what was noticed, and what was uncertain at the time.

  1. 2026 Roast Notes — the main archive
  2. Roast 91 and Roast 92 — Same Plan, Different Result — a good recent starting point
  3. Roast 70–75 — The Repaired Gene Café Has a Different Fingerprint

If you want to understand how I taste and assess coffee

  1. How I’m Learning to Taste Coffee (Without Chasing Tasting Notes)
  2. How I Cup Coffee
  3. Cupping Form — download the practical cupping card

Current project position

The Gene Café CBR-301 used for this project underwent a heater repair during 2026. Post-repair, the machine behaves differently. Roasts from Roast 70 onward reflect a recalibration period.

TRT (Total Roast Time) remains a useful planned input. But TRT alone is not enough. Roast pace, milestone timing, weight loss, and cup result all matter — and they don’t always agree.

The project is ongoing.