Roasting coffee means bringing out the best in every bean. The foundation for this is high-quality green coffee beans, which offer different flavor profiles depending on their origin and variety. By choosing the roast level, you can deliberately influence the character: lighter roasts usually highlight fruity notes and vibrant acidity, while darker roasts bring out more sweetness, body, and richness.
During roasting, heat and the chemical reactions that occur allow these flavors to develop – they therefore play a key role in determining the taste and digestibility of the coffee. Each bean has its own potential, and with the right roast, you decide on the intensity and nuances in your cup.
Coffee roasting machines support this process with precise technology, ensuring consistent results. This way, you can gradually learn to control the roasting process and adjust your coffee to suit your taste and preferred brewing method.
Learn to Roast in a Course
Our courses at the Roast Rebels Atelier in Zurich let you dive into the world of coffee roasting in just half a day. You’ll learn how green coffee is selected and processed, and gain fascinating insights into growing regions, variety, and quality. In addition, we provide the theoretical foundations of roasting – a solid base for your understanding of coffee and the roasting process.
On small drum roasters, we guide you step by step through the most important processes. You’ll experience firsthand how temperature, time, and roast profiles influence flavor, and develop a sense of how each bean reveals its own character. You take your own roasts home with you at the end of the course.
The small groups create an open learning atmosphere with plenty of room for exchange and mutual support. This allows you to get straight into practical experience – engaging, easy to understand, and with lasting benefits for your future roasts.
Advanced Training in Multi-Day Courses
A multi-day training course gives you the opportunity to deepen your knowledge and gain even more practical experience. You’ll learn how to precisely control roast profiles and how factors like temperature, airflow, or pressure affect the final result in the cup. In the process, you sharpen your awareness of quality and develop a better understanding of the subtleties of roasting.
At the same time, you benefit from interacting with other coffee roasting enthusiasts and gain new perspectives from the community. The combination of hands-on practice and background knowledge creates a solid foundation: you gain confidence in working with different beans and learn to consciously shape individual flavor profiles.
Recommendations for Multi-Day Training
At the Kaffeemacher in Basel, you can learn hands-on coffee roasting in multi-day courses and gain valuable expertise. Blaser Café in Bern combines tradition with modern methods and shows you different ways to develop the character of each bean. The Bonner Coffee School caters to home and professional roasters, focusing on building a solid foundation for your roasting practice.
Individually, Erhan Dizbay in Berlin tailors the experience to you: he guides you personally, explains the details of roasting, and supports you in gradually expanding your skills.
Inspiring Books for Beginners and Professionals
If you want to learn how to roast coffee beans, specialist literature provides a valuable foundation for your journey. Classics like The Coffee Roasters Companion or Coffee Roasting Best Practices are essential reading for any ambitious roaster, as they offer practical recommendations and structured guidance. Clear step-by-step explanations give you confidence in handling beans, roast profiles, and the typical challenges of the practice.
More comprehensive works like The Book of Roast go much deeper, showing the complex connections between technique, chemistry and sensory results. With Green Coffee: A Guide for Roasters and Buyers, you also have the right reference if you are interested in green coffee, as selecting the right raw product is crucial for quality and taste in the cup. Such resources help you broaden your perspective beyond roasting itself and understand the entire coffee chain better.
Particularly valuable are the tips from experienced professionals, which are conveyed in these books in an easy-to-understand way and help you avoid common beginner mistakes. Investing in carefully selected specialist literature not only ensures lasting learning success but also provides constant inspiration that motivates you to continuously develop your roasting skills and explore new flavor worlds.
The Book of Roast (The Book of Roast: The Craft of Coffee Roasting from Bean to Business) by the editors of Roast Magazine is probably the most comprehensive work on coffee roasting with nearly 500 pages. It covers practically all aspects of roasting. The basis is a collection of articles that have appeared in Roast Magazine, supplemented by a few contributions that complete the book. Therefore, it is not structured classically like a textbook, but specific questions are illuminated in each case. However, the articles have been selected and arranged in such a way that all relevant aspects are examined in depth. Topics covered in the book include: History of roasting Coffee production Processing methods Certifications Buying green coffee Storage of green coffee Green coffee defects Purchasing a roaster Cleaning a roaster Science of coffee roasting Roasting styles and techniques Cupping and sensory evaluation Quality control Blending Decaffeinated coffee Packaging Business basics Emissions Legal basics (focus on the USA) The book is only available in English. 461 pages. Highly recommended for both beginners and experienced roasters. ISBN: 978-0-9987717-0-0
This book is a continuation of the book "The Book of Roast". Spanning almost 500 pages, Volume 2 includes additional carefully curated contributions published in Roast Magazine. Topics covered include coffee production and processing, green coffee sourcing, roasting machines, the science and technology of roasting, cupping and sensory coffee evaluation, as well as coffee roasting as a business. These are the topics covered in the book: - Coffee production and processing - Green coffee defects and classification - Cupping and sensory evaluation - Coffee sourcing and logistics - Equipment and technology - Roasting processes and techniques - Quality control - The science of coffee & coffee roasting - The roasting business The book is only available in English. 479 pages. It is interesting for both beginners looking to delve into the world of coffee roasting and experienced professionals looking to expand their expertise. This book can also be read independently of Volume 1. ISBN: 978-0-9987717-5-5
The Coffee Roasters Companion is the classic book on coffee roasting. Scott Rao gives very concrete instructions and tips on coffee roasting based on his many years of sound experience. Those who follow his recommendations will roast very good coffee quickly and easily. An absolute recommendation for both beginners and experienced roasters. ISBN: 9781495118197
The book Green Coffee: A Guide for Roasters and Buyers is a comprehensive source of information on green coffee. In 179 pages, it provides an in-depth look at unroasted coffee: its history, processing methods, sourcing practices, analysis, roasting, and more. It incorporates new research, experiments and collaborations - enriched with personal experiences of author Chris Kornman and professionals. Although it is an analytical book with a lot of theory, it is written in an understandable and straightforward manner. Author Chris Kornman is an experienced coffee quality specialist, researcher, author, and director of education at The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab and Tasting Room in Oakland, California. He has extensive experience in coffee grading, roasting, sourcing, is a traveler and tinkerer. The book is available in English only. 179 pages. We recommend this indispensable guide to coffee industry professionals as well as ambitious home roasters who want to learn more about green coffee. ISBN: 978-0-9987717-4-8
Coffee Roasting: Best Practices is the most advanced guide ever written on expert-level coffee roasting. Scott Rao's book primarily focuses on current techniques for creating and controlling roast curves, with numerous pages dedicated to strategies for avoiding roasting errors and optimising flavour. This book sets the standard for "third wave" coffee. It is an ideal complement to the book The Coffee Roaster's Companion, which focuses on the fundamentals of roasting and various roasting machines. This book is only available in English. 94 pages. ISBN 978-1-7923-2775-9
Gaining Practical Experience
Using Digital Courses
A digital coffee roasting workshop gives you the opportunity to acquire valuable knowledge flexibly and from anywhere. One example is the Roast Rebels Online Academy: in about four hours, you get a comprehensive introduction to roasting with Aillio Bullet machines. Topics include setup, software, and maintenance, complemented by practical demonstrations.
Step-by-step videos guide you through the operation and give you confidence for your own roasts. This benefits both beginners who want to learn the basics and experienced users who want to deepen their knowledge.
The advantage: you can review the content anytime, focus on specific areas, and gradually improve your roasting practice step by step.
On YouTube, we provide an extensive video library designed to help you get started with roasting and continually inspire you. In our videos, we explain roasting basics, explore specialized topics step by step, so you can quickly gain confidence in handling beans and roasting processes. We have a YouTube channel in German and a YouTube channel in English, so you can access the content in the language that suits you best.
Particularly helpful for many are the experience reports and tutorials, where we demonstrate complex topics in a practical way and provide concrete tips for your own roasts. At the same time, we value community interaction highly: you can ask questions, share knowledge, and learn from others. Since all content is freely accessible, you have an easy way to continuously learn and develop further as a coffee roaster.
Create Your Own Coffee Experience
When you roast coffee yourself, you open up a new world of flavors that you can shape entirely according to your preferences. With some knowledge, practice, and the right equipment, you’ll discover how diverse flavors can be and how each roast brings out new nuances.
Coffee roasting is a craft that brings joy and delivers special results from the very start. Over time, you deepen your understanding, refine your technique – and roasting becomes a personal passion that will stay with you for a long time.