We talk with the people from Showroom coffee and crop to cup, about their new roaster the Arc S. If you’d prefer to watch the interview, it’s on our YouTube channel link to below.
This article is a transcription of the interview, and we’ve timestamped the main headings, so you can jump to any part of the conversation in the YouTube interview by looking at the timestamp in the article below.
[00:00:17.070] – Nick Baskett
Here with me, I’m here with the team who make behind the ARC Roasters, and I’ve got Kate, Dan and Taylor. Kate, why don’t you just give a short introduction to yourself?
Introductions
[00:00:30.510] – Cait McGehee
Yeah, great, I’m Cait McGehee. I work with the Crop to Cup team as their director of communications and marketing. Yeah. Super and Dan.
[00:00:44.550] – Dan Shafer
I’m Dan. I’m our director of operations and head of quality control.
[00:00:50.300] – Nick Baskett
Fantastic and Taylor, I know that you’re in a bit of a noisy environment, but could you give a short introduction?
[00:00:58.070] – Taylor Mork
Sure, yeah. My name is Taylor Moore and I’m one of the founders of Crop to cup coffee importers and showroom coffee as well. We sell the roasters, so I do most of the sourcing for a coffee cup working with producers around the world. I started also with started with Dan on building the Arc roaster Project.
[00:01:17.630] – Nick Baskett
Fantastic. Much more on.
[00:01:20.240] – Nick Baskett
Thanks a lot, Taylor.
Relationship Between Showroom Coffee, Crop to Cup and Arc
[00:01:21.770] – Nick Baskett
Dan, so we’re we’re going to talk a little bit about the new roasted that you’re coming out with. But I’d really like to hear about the company. And in fact, there’s three companies, the three companies involved in the group. There’s the showroom, coffee Arc roasters and Crop to cup. What’s the relationship between those three?
[00:01:43.460] – Dan Shafer
So the run down is about 13 years ago. Taylor, who you just met, and his co-founder, Jake Elster, started crop to cup coffee importers to promote and sell specialty coffee and coffee in the US to work with farmers. And that company, crop to cup coffee importers is still around today works and a lot more countries than just Uganda. But in that time, over the last 13 years. I’ve been with the company since 2010, so for the last decade, we’ve met both small roasters and smallholder farmers that had.
[00:02:29.970] – Dan Shafer
Real needs for evaluating coffee, whether that was starting a small business or whether that was finding good coffee at the small holder level, cooperative level, and even at the small farmers state level by different parts of their farm or different varietals. They were trying or different processing. So we didn’t really get into the roasting side because we were dying to do it. It was that we saw need on both ends of the supply chain to really want to get a good look at coffee.
[00:03:04.740] – Dan Shafer
And and a lot of roasters and producers felt like coffee roasters were too expensive. They have to take out a big loan that they didn’t have or pull from another aspect of their business to do that.
[00:03:18.030] – Nick Baskett
So what year was this?
[00:03:22.080] – Dan Shafer
Well, that that that needs they ever present the need to want to find good coffee has always been there, but Taylor in 2016 when he was working in China and partnered with a family owned factory there when he eyed a roaster, that kind of the bones of a roaster that he thought could really work for a lot of the roasters that we were selling to and talking to that was looking for a small batch roaster, a profile roaster that you could even use as a sample roaster that can grow with carbon, steel drum, good quality.
The Arc 800
[00:04:02.910] – Dan Shafer
And that’s really when Arc roasters was born, was you tailor making that partnership and finding really the engineer that had come up with this this really great roaster that we could improve and then sell to around the world. So that’s that’s where Arc roaster started. And that that model is the Arc 800 And then Showroom Coffee is a new company that is meant to serve smaller roasters. So that could be home roasters can’t quite yet at the full buy at the full bag level or a small roaster that wants to try a lot of different coffees.
[00:04:50.610] – Dan Shafer
Isn’t ready yet? Is it ready to commit to the full bag or it doesn’t have that purchasing power yet. So we by splitting off Crop to Cup split bag business into a new company, showroom. We’re able to better service those customers and really focus that crop to cup focus on what it does well, which is, as Taylor mentioned, working with smallholder farmers around the world to import specialty coffee and let showroom really target and support small home roasters, small batch roasters and the ARC brand really Mary’s best with the the showroom coffee brand because we’re we’re selling a roaster that you can then use at home or in your in your cafe and you have these, this split weight to go with it.
[00:05:41.280] – Dan Shafer
So those are the three to three different companies.
[00:05:45.270] – Nick Baskett
So in some respects it’s kind of kind of a turnkey, kind of a turnkey solution that you can offer roasters because you’ve got you’re not just selling a machine, but you’ve also got the other elements that feed into it, right?
[00:06:00.060] – Dan Shafer
Yeah. I don’t want to oversell it. Like, you can get everything from us, but I think I think the best way to frame it is that we we really try to only get involved in parts of the coffee supply chain where we feel like we can add value. So that starts at the team level. You know, it’s there’s a lot of coffee traded around the world, but we’re very intentional about what supply changes we choose to get involved in.
[00:06:26.370] – Dan Shafer
If we think we can be helpful on the crop to cup coffee side, that’s usually farmers that don’t yet have access to the US market or Canadian market. And we can help be that bridge, you know, on the roster side. So a lot of roasters on the market that you can buy, we’re very intentionally trying to to get to help roasters get access to a small batch roster that that can grow with them. You know, there’s a lot of that that
[00:06:56.400] – Nick Baskett
we’re going to come onto the whole because that that that’s the excitement.
[00:06:59.100] – Nick Baskett
I can’t give it all up front there. Then I’m back. Tell me a little bit about your own history.
How it Started
[00:07:05.940] – Nick Baskett
What what have you said? The business has been going for about ten years. When did you come into it and what’s your background?
[00:07:14.160] – Dan Shafer
Sure. So I think most people have a circuitous path into coffee. Mine was I had a strong interest in East Africa. I studied abroad in Kenya and Ethiopia. And for a while, I was taking high school students on experiential learning trips around the world, predominantly in Africa, and so I moved to New York for my now wife and I was looking for a job. And Crop to Cup was a socially conscious, for profit business that was working specifically with smallholder farmers in Uganda and East Africa, which really struck a chord with me to see if we could.
[00:08:01.010] – Dan Shafer
There could be a way to add value to the supply chain outside of the non-profit industry. I like that that mix. So that’s why I joined Crop to Cup. Over the last 10 years, I’ve worked just about every job in coffee. We brought in Ugandan coffee back then and one of the easiest ways to sell it was roasted. So we had a small roasted brand back then. So I’ve been everything from a barista. Cafe manager wholesale sales, espresso tech right to the best way, right?
[00:08:39.740] – Dan Shafer
You do learn.
[00:08:41.810] – Dan Shafer
I would say it definitely helps promote empathy for everyone in the supply chain because you see where people are coming from. And then I went on my own journey for quality of getting my cue creator license, getting more into cupping, understanding the quality behind coffee. And Taylor and I have actually traveled quite a bit in that decade and I share a lot of the sourcing responsibilities around the world as well with the co-founder, Jake, and the rest of our our small team here.
[00:09:14.390] – Dan Shafer
So I. Gotten a nice look at coffee for sure.
Arc’s Product Lines
[00:09:19.290] – Nick Baskett
Fantastic, so thank you. So we’ve got the background, we got the background of the companies and of yourself. What are the product lines that you’ve got in OK right now, so you’ve got is two roasters at the moment that you sell?
[00:09:32.430] – Dan Shafer
Yes. So we’ve been selling the 800 for just over four years. And that is a roaster that we’ve we sell all over the world from exporters in Papua New Guinea, cooperative’s in Kenya and Uganda, as well as small roasters around the US.
[00:09:56.300] – Dan Shafer
And we were so enthused by the support and reaction to the to the Arc 800 and really how good the quality of it was, especially in the value. So I saw a real need for better sample roasting, one of my other many jobs has been to be our sample roaster over the years. So I felt that pain firsthand. So we just launched this year a second product under the ARC line called the Arc S, which is really just a very specific sample roaster.
[00:10:32.180] – Dan Shafer
It’s a roaster with a single, very direct purpose. And that that just just launched. So just the two two roasters
[00:10:41.960] – Nick Baskett
going back one one second. You said when you’re talking about the 800 and you done sample roasting yourself, you said you felt the pain. What what specifically were the issues that you were coming up against?
Issues with Current Designs
[00:10:57.140] – Dan Shafer
Right. So the you’re kind of getting at the why here of why they’re talking about the why.
[00:11:04.550] – Nick Baskett
Well, the why so important, you know, but yeah, like we talked about in before we started recording, you know, the just dishing out the specs doesn’t really inform anybody, doesn’t tell people what you’re about and the why is so much more interesting. So yeah. Yeah. I’m interested in the why.
[00:11:24.140] – Dan Shafer
Yeah I agree. So. The Arc is for me, it’s a it’s really a passion project and and the pain that I’m talking about is traditionally sampled. Germ roasting is an open drum. You put a fire or a spoon into a single open drum or a series of of small little barrels, open drum barrels. And you kind of chase smoke. You know, that that’s that’s the simplest way to do it is, you know, these smoke spills out the front of the drum.
[00:11:59.540] – Dan Shafer
So you’re you’re trying to look at the color of being while you’re looking through smoke. And, you know, while you’re getting a lot of smells at the same time, obviously it can be done. Been people been doing it for a long time, but it kind of asked the sample roaster to do a lot at the same time, especially when you have three, four or five drums going at the same time. That requires all those drums to be operating, you know, at exactly the same.
[00:12:29.190] – Dan Shafer
So whether we’re in Burundi at the national lab and seeing a sample roaster explained to me that he knows this drum is spinning at a much faster rate or this drum gets too hot too quickly. It’s just the amount of small adjustments that you’re having to make at the same time is is a lot. I mean, not to mention the fact that each coffee put in there has a different moisture content and water activity and density and all that. So it’s it’s it’s it’s one of those parts of the industry I think people don’t think a ton about because you’re like, oh, it’s not production roasting.
[00:13:06.710] – Dan Shafer
There’s no end consumer here. But from my vantage point, it’s it’s one of the most important because it’s your opportunity to find good coffee. So you should be caring about this, because if you don’t find it at this end, you’re never going to get it in production.
[00:13:22.820] – Nick Baskett
Right, exactly. A lot of sense. Right. You can reproduce it. So how do you so so question in my mind, and I’m sorry if this is this is kind of a very basic question, but how do you ensure that what you get from the sample roast is what goes is what you can get out of the production roast? And I understand that this this sometimes software, you can you can go the software route where you save a profile and you employ that on the on the batch roaster and you should get the same results.
[00:13:57.260] – Nick Baskett
But how do you address that, that particular problem?
How Arc Addresses the Issues
[00:13:59.870] – Dan Shafer
Yeah, no, you’re you’re it’s a it’s a very good question. So the first why or the first problem I was sort of explaining was the fact that it’s open drum. So on the other guest, we we put a closed drum on that to make that an easier roasting experience. It’s also a roasting experience that’s more. Realistic to what your end product is going to taste like, right? You’re not roasting. One hundred and thirty two pounds of coffee on an open drum.
[00:14:26.780] – Dan Shafer
So why would you taste your sample roast on something different? The software you’re talking about, like an Ikawa, like a small air roasted coffee. It’s a fantastic piece of software and engineering to to roast a very small amount of coffee the same way every time. It is also air roasting. So there is a difference between the way the coffee is going to. Yeah, yeah. How it’s the end product is going to taste like. Now, if you’re a commercial batch, commercial roasters and air roaster, I could see that being a good fit.
[00:15:03.020] – Dan Shafer
But the vast, vast majority of roasters, especially our customers, are drum roasters. They roast on drums. So that was also part of the why of having a carbon steel drum and a closed system on the ensuring. The good I really think sample roasting and copying and evaluating coffee is about seeing your coffee potential. It’s an agricultural crop. Freshness is a is a factor here. So there is a lot of, you know, managing expectations. But to my earlier point, you only know if a coffee is good.
[00:15:44.360] – Dan Shafer
If you if you’re if you’re able to get a good look at it and the Arc S gives you that that opportunity and to replicate it and to make the roasting process easier for it for a sample. So that’s and also at a reasonable price point. That’s another reason a lot of roasters don’t have sample is they’re very expensive and then the ones built for origin, rightfully so. We’re built belt drives extremely easy to maintain kind of low fi intentionally because they knew the conditions would be less than ideal for a roasting environment.
[00:16:24.680] – Dan Shafer
And while I think that that’s good from a maintenance standpoint, I think the bar could be much higher with what you’re asking your sample roaster to be at an export lab or a cooperative lab. Right.
[00:16:37.130] – Nick Baskett
So we’ve got the two products, the the Arc 800, which was your initial first first foray, which which was quite successful, and you sold it all over the world. What was the excuse me, I may have missed this earlier, but what was the the reason then for the Arc S? So the 800 got for we can have that up to four drums you can have it up to four drums or is that the S?
The Arc S Features – Why it Exists
[00:17:03.830] – Dan Shafer
the Arc 800 is a single roaster, so it’s not a modular. It’s not a modular unit.
[00:17:09.030] – Nick Baskett
Right. And the modular ability. Right. Exactly.
[00:17:13.100] – Dan Shafer
Exactly. So Arc 800 you could go down to maybe three, four hundred grams and use it as a sample roaster, but.
[00:17:24.370] – Dan Shafer
Realistically, if you want to taste a lot of different coffees at your restaurant, decide which one you want to buy or if you’re a farmer and you’re trying to figure out which one is good, you need a lot of drums or you eat, so you need at least a couple. So that’s the art is about specifically looking at simple roasting and the ARC 8 know, the nice thing about it is it’s a roaster that can grow with you. So maybe it’s your first roaster and then you do well and you want to buy a bigger one because it had the quality of build matches, a larger scale roaster, you can profile on it and then kind of go to bat.
[00:18:05.260] – Nick Baskett
That makes a lot of sense.
[00:18:06.550] – Dan Shafer
Go to that next level up roaster.
[00:18:09.270] – Nick Baskett
And you’ve partially answered the question I had as well, which was why the multiple drums trying to again, my background is not in roasting. So you’re you’re you’re giving me a free education here as well.
[00:18:23.530] – Nick Baskett
But but but the multiple drums exist because you’re able to sample different types of coffee at the same time. Is that. But why is that so important? Why can’t you sample one after another?
[00:18:37.000] – Dan Shafer
It’s about time. It’s about time. OK, it is really about time. So you can go down all sorts of rabbit holes with what the best roasting is and timetable. But let us just ballpark it for conversation’s sake. Like somewhere around eight minutes. Let’s say you’re going to do an eight minute sample roast that you’re roasting software that you mention goes on the quicker end so you can save time through that. But as I mentioned, it’s not the same as drum roasting.
[00:19:06.850] – Dan Shafer
So you’re evaluating the product in a different way, but it’s really about time.
[00:19:12.470] – Dan Shafer
So to have someone sit there and and roast on a single drum, maybe 60, 60 samples in a day is literally get through that many more than that.
[00:19:28.000] – Dan Shafer
And you know what’s what’s amazing is at the let’s look at a small holder. Cooperative farmers are bringing Cherry into the washing station, whether it’s a natural process or washed, however it is, you know, the harvest happens and you want to evaluate the quality of the coffee throughout the harvest and you want to identify the good and kind of move your energy towards coffees. And you’re constantly planning and rejiggering kind of where you from? From a Washington station manager, from a cooperative management framework, kind of like where am I going to sell this?
[00:20:06.970] – Dan Shafer
You know, what coffee do I want to bulk together to make different sort of blends? And to do that, you need to be tasting it and tasting it. And that’s that’s really the importance of having it in country lab. And you need a ton of drums to do that. And there’s some incredible sample roasters on the market. Some of them, you know, may require a loan for a group like that to get $10,000 US us for a single drum that makes multi drum sample roasting really, really difficult for a lot of people, I imagine.
[00:20:42.070] – Dan Shafer
And that’s a that’s another big part of the why here is in order to find that to find good coffee, in order to reward the incredible work happening at the producer level, you have to be able to pull it out to differentiate it. You have to say, I have the ability to cup Nicks coffee next to Caits and see if Nicks has potential to do that. And to do that, you need to you need more drums. So that’s another big part of multi drum.
[00:21:11.170] – Dan Shafer
And then the modular the modular system is you want to be comparing apples to apples so you’re able to not have these different drums roasting a little bit differently. You want them all roasted, shared air airflow.
[00:21:26.620] – Nick Baskett
There’s going to be some kind of calibration issue from one to another. There just is. That’s that’s life. The case that’s really helped a lot. That’s really interesting. And then the the you mentioned blends, which is a thing with me at the moment. I have to say with us, where we’re tasting a lot more blends. I know the single origin is is what everybody’s talking about now, but I’ve got no problems with blends, I have to say.
[00:21:54.310] – Nick Baskett
In fact, I rather enjoy blends. And I think it opens up a new dimension of opportunities and potential for roasters who aren’t afraid of creating blends to to be a bit more creative and to and to make interesting coffees. So does the multi does. You’re smiling. I don’t know if I’m saying something stupid now, but. No, no, no, I’m going to stick with it. This is how I feel.
[00:22:18.670] – Dan Shafer
But I, I totally I get that. And from from a. Sort of, you know, wanting to give an end customer experience of having a more balanced uniform profile like I agree, it can be really, really nice. Reason I was smiling was single origins are still blends. And that’s kind of the funny part of you’re right.
[00:22:43.240] – Dan Shafer
OK, you’re right. The coffee supply chain is let’s I mean, they usually are. I’ll put it that way is that, you know, you’re blending the best of that of that harvest together to get up to an exportable amount of volume. So the heavy cupping is just pulling out the good and blended blending is maybe a wrong way to frame it. But it’s, you know, importers, cooperatives, exporters, whoever is choosing how to put the coffee together, you just need a lot of the drums to at least have that opportunity, you know, otherwise you’re just getting a single sample that says yes or no.
[00:23:23.430] – Dan Shafer
You mix all the farmers. You know, it’s so
The Future of Roasting
[00:23:26.130] – Nick Baskett
it’s it’s really interesting. So, look, let’s let’s talk about the future of the future of roasting. That sounds very exciting. But, you know, we’re going through a and unprecedented time at the moment where the the landscape is changing in a way that that none of us have predicted could have predicted. And we’re all having to dance a little bit and to to pivot, as consultants like to say. But we’ve got in the UK, I can tell you, and I know this is also the case in the US there there’s a lot of coffee chains are hurting very badly.
[00:24:05.730] – Nick Baskett
Some of the and we just had a story that went out a few days ago. I think one of the major chains here in the UK is a Cafe nero is on the verge of going into administration and a number of other companies, chains here are looking at it, evaluating how they’re how they’re going to sell coffee, how the Pret a Manger always used to say that, of saying follow the skyscraper because they put all of their coffee shops and there were more than coffee, but they they coffee was a big part of it, but they put their shops where businesses were.
[00:24:44.700] – Nick Baskett
So you followed the skyscraper. And now that that model is as far as the CEO of Pret a Manger is concerned, that model is gone and they now change that to saying follow the customer. And the customer generally seems to be more often in a in a suburban environment. And I was reading a story also about Australia and a similar way in Melbourne, which is a city of great coffee culture where people want to see coffee, where they’re at, which is more and more frequently at home and in their local communities rather than in the cities.
[00:25:22.570] – Nick Baskett
And so this is a challenge for for the the retail side of the business. How does that impact you or how does it impact your customers? You can talk a little bit about how the landscape is changing for you and and whether you feel that this is just a short term challenge that we need to get through or whether there’s a fundamental change.
[00:25:47.720] – Dan Shafer
Well, I don’t know how many like hotcakes I’m willing to give up on predicting the future, but I will say that the coffee industry, from my vantage point is, is very much a community and the pandemic has hit everyone up and down the supply chain.
[00:26:07.400] – Dan Shafer
We’ve lost we’ve lost some good friends to covid that unfortunately passed away on the supply side. So this has been it’s been heartbreaking. You know, we’ve had customers declare bankruptcy, go out of business, obviously, with those that were set up that are for online sales and wholesaling to grocery stores. Our products are definitely doing better. And those that were retail focused are struggling. So it’s it’s it’s been tough watching both ends of of the supply chain struggle on the supply side.
[00:26:52.010] – Dan Shafer
There were already huge issues. And this is kind of compounding them from some pricing pressures, from things get very country specific. But there’s global warming. There’s lots of challenges on the supply side. And this has made things very difficult on the supply side. So we’ve done everything we can as a as an importer to support our customers, whether on the roasting side, whether that’s extending terms, waiving credit card fees, whatever we could do to help keep people keep the lights on.
[00:27:28.790] – Dan Shafer
You know, if you go back to this past spring and it was, you know, things were constantly changing, so we were just constantly talking about how can we make a plan? How can we support? And the same thing was true with with farmers as we got harvest to harvest, you know, just talking a lot and making a plant coming up with creative solutions. So I think this year has just been a lot of trying to to support each other as best we can.
[00:27:55.490] – Dan Shafer
And I don’t know how much this will stretch into 2021. You know, I know a vaccine isn’t going to be a silver bullet immediately around the world. So I do think this will take a bit of time. But there’s part of the reason we’re very passionate about this is there are a lot of big problems in the coffee industry that we’re trying to help solve or be supportive of the answers where we can be, which is, again, why why we got involved in and selling these roasters this this harvest we’re shipping in our guest to one of our partners.
[00:28:37.610] – Dan Shafer
And in Rwanda, you know, just we’ve got it. I mean, it’s brand new. So for four people, they’re looking for reviews online, are used to things like that. I’m expecting in the next few months you’ll be able to see more of that as more of these units get find homes.
The Importance of Aesthetics
[00:28:58.430] – Nick Baskett
But to say they’re very they’re very good looking units to look at. You’ve done a great job in terms of design aesthetics. And I was reading on your I don’t know where it was, maybe on the article he sent me that it was important to you because you you know that these things are often in the front office. They’re they’re they’re front and center and front. People want to show them off. You know, if you’re roasting coffee, you want to tell people and show people your roasting coffee and you want to do it on something that looks looks beautiful because there’s an interpretation from that into the quality.
[00:29:36.020] – Dan Shafer
And so I have to say, I actually really like the look of what you’ve what you’ve created. So so congratulations there.
[00:29:45.500]
And I and I guess being able to keep that price point that well, you know what? you probabloy don’t listen to my podcasts and things and please don’t, because they’re they’re they’re they’re terrible. But I talk with a scientist every week about who builds coffee, rebuilds and refurbishes coffee machines. I have a thing where I talk a lot about how important it is, the quality of what I’m touching. So when I’m interacting with the machine and I’m doing that on a regular basis, I don’t want to feel like I’m interacting with something that’s cheap plasticy that has that has a feel that just leaves me cold.
[00:30:28.580] – Nick Baskett
I want to interact with something that makes me feel that elevates me to to to being maybe more of an artist than I am. But but it makes me feel good every time I look at it. It makes me feel good every time I touch it. I think that’s actually a very important thing for the soul if we’re interacting with something, everything. All day, if you make that thing an ugly, bad, cheap, nasty thing that you interact with every single day, that just brings your life down a little bit.
[00:30:53.910] – Nick Baskett
So for a coffee roaster having, I think, a machine that not only is quality, but also looks the part I think is is is actually very important.
[00:31:03.870] – Dan Shafer
And so I going to say I agree with that. And it’s it’s funny to think about, for lack of a better word, the Arc that that design took from like a sketch in my notepad to just the years of back and forth with the engineers, because a big part of the Arc S is, you know, we wanted you to have the same level of drum control of gas pressure, control and air flow control that you have with your production roast that you’re used to roasting. So you don’t have to, like, go into this totally different headspace of how to separate an open drum versus how do I production roast on a closed drum.
[00:31:45.510] – Dan Shafer
So to get all of that functionality and still have it look at and be modular was it took a lot of different twists and turns.
[00:31:56.760] – Nick Baskett
It did. But easy when you look at it from the outside, do you think? Well, of course. But to get to that point, you must have gone through a lot of iterations and a lot of, you know, a lot of redesigns to get to something that you’re happy with.
[00:32:11.970] – Dan Shafer
Yeah, and I do I feel confident that with the version we have now, we’ve we have married, there’s been a lot of happy compromises that actually turned out to be better. You know, sometimes you think you’ve just you’ve got it and like, send it off. Like, this is perfect. And I’m not a I’m not a mechanical engineer, so I’ll get certain feedback to your point. You get your hands on it, you get your hands on the unit and you feel it and you get in the headspace of this, like this could be better.
[00:32:42.840] – Dan Shafer
And I feel like I’m very proud, very happy about what we’ve got for sale now and what and what the Arc S has become.
Wrapping Up
[00:32:51.540] – Nick Baskett
So super. You know let’s end it there. That’s a fantastic place to to wrap it up. I know you’ve got a limited amount of time as well. And we were a bit late starting because we have some technical issues that saved us. So God bless you, Cait.
[00:33:08.580] – Nick Baskett
No problem. Thank you for that. I really enjoyed that conversation and I felt like I learned quite a bit on it as well, to be honest. It makes what you’re saying makes a lot of sense. Right. So it’s important if I can see that. Hopefully everybody else can see that, too. But it’s important that that somebody’s coming into this who who doesn’t know who you are, understands, like, OK, it’s modular. It means I can do this, OK?
[00:33:40.800] – Nick Baskett
It’s built in the way that I can sample growth and my production batch. Right. Is going to be is going to be the same that that that’s useful to me. Yeah. I mean, the price point, you know
[00:33:53.190] – Dan Shafer
I think if I could have one takeaway for for listeners, it’s that you can sample roast, you can you can make this happen. And from a roaster side, that means you can be a better buyer, you can get a better product for your customers, maybe a more informed by position. And on the producer side, you know, you can get into sample roasting and quality evaluation to find good coffee.
[00:34:16.480] – Dan Shafer
And that’s really our goal here is to make these make this accessible and be part of that same that same team of fine good coffee. Awesome.
[00:34:26.070] – Dan Shafer
Great luck with it then. Is really enjoyable to to talk with you all.
