In development and production it can become essential to not only document exactly the way a roast session was conducted, but also its outcome. Artisan offers a number of tools to collect data of roasting sessions like temperature developments over time and occurrence of key events.
This profile information can be complemented by additional roast properties like type and amount of green beans, weight of resulting roasted beans, roast color. Finally, and less know, Artisan allows also to add cupping and roast notes as well as to specify the resulting cup profile per roast.
Roast Properties
Before, during or after a roast session you can complement the logged temperature profile with additional information like a roast title, a specification of the beans used, the weight and moisture of the greens and the roasted beans, the measured roast color and other parameters. This data can be entered in the Roast Properties dialog (menu Roast >> Properties). Artisan complements some of these informations automatically by derived data like the weight loss, volume gain or bean density.
Roasting and Cupping Notes
The second tab of the Roast Properties dialog allows to add notes on the roasting process and the cupping process. Additionally, you can set flags to mark typical roast properties and defects.
Cup Profile
While complementing roast profiles with textual cupping notes is often helpful, the standard way to describe the taste and aroma of a roast as detected by a regular cupping process is by defining a cup profile. A cup profile assigns values to fixed cupping parameters and usually renders those in a radar chart (sometimes called spider graph). Artisan supports the creation of such cup profiles (menu Roast >> Cup Profile).
Artisan comes with a number of pre-defined sets of cupping attributes (like body, acidity, ..) as defined by the SCA, SweetMaria, or Intelligentsia, but also allows to define a custom one. Attribute values can simply be assigned via a table and are rendered as chart also indicating the sum of the evaluation result. This sum as well as the cupping chart are also part of the roasting reports that can be generated via menu File >> Report >> Roast.
If a background profile is loaded its cup profile is rendered in the background as well if the "Background Aspect Ratio" flag is ticked.
Wheel Graphs
More recently a number so-called flavor wheels, like the one available from SCA, have been proposed to aid in the cupping process to come up with somewhat standardised evaluation results. A nice variant that features interactive navigation has been put online by Jason Davies (click to zoom in, click center circle to zoom out).
Artisan comes with a general editor for wheel graphs, which are essentially bar graphs in polar coordinates. This editor allows you to design and print your own flavor wheel (menu Tools >> Wheel Graph). You add layers from inside out by adding wheels in the Wheel Graph Editor table. You specify the elements of a layer by simply specify a comma separated list of names as labels and press the Update labels button. You can further change the radius, the text size and text project as well as the starting angle per layer.
Finally, you can modify the Properties of all elements in a layer in a second table, which also allows you to set an elements color and opaqueness as well as its relative width. Finally, this property table also allows to assign elements to specific parents to make sure they get rendered underneath. Further parameters allow you to change the general look by specifying the line color used, the edge width and others. Once you are happy with the result you can save your wheel and switch into View Mode to either export the wheel as PDF for printing or to operate it by picking elements and adding their name to the cupping or roasting notes of the actual profile.
