How to get your roast history out of any roasting software

The worst time to find out what your roasting software will give you back is the week you decide to leave it. Exports are the least-loved corner of every product in this trade, ours included, and the gap between what a vendor says you can export and what lands in the file is usually a few fields wide.

So do it now, while nothing depends on it. Pull a full export from whatever you run today, open it, and check it against the list further down. If it is complete, you have a backup. If it is not, you have found that out on a quiet Tuesday rather than during a migration.

Where each system keeps it

Artisan

Every roast is already a file on your own machine. The .alog profile holds the full curve, the events and the metadata; File, Export gives you CSV, and Batches, Export gives you the whole log as one table. Nothing is held server-side, which is the quiet advantage of running a desktop app.

Cropster

Roast data comes out through the reporting screens as CSV, one export per report rather than one archive for everything. Ask support for a full account export if you want the lot: it exists, but it is not a button.

RoastLog

Exports run per roast and per date range from the roast list. Green inventory comes out separately.

RoastPATH

Profiles export as .rpath files, one per profile. It is a profile format rather than a production record, so the batch history around it needs collecting separately.

If you are on something not listed here, the pattern holds: look for an export on the roast list rather than inside a single roast, and look for inventory separately from production. The two almost never come out together.

What a complete export actually contains

A curve is not a record. Plenty of exports hand you a beautiful time-and-temperature series and quietly leave out the things that make it mean something eighteen months later. Check for all of these:

• The curve itself: bean temperature, environmental temperature, and the time base they share.
• Rate of rise, or enough resolution to recalculate it. If the file has one sample every thirty seconds you cannot rebuild it.
• Milestones: charge, turning point, first crack, drop. With timestamps, not just marks.
• Control events. Gas, air and drum changes, with the time each one happened. This is the part most often missing, and it is the part that makes a curve reproducible.
• Charge and drop weights, which give you shrinkage.
• Which green lot went in. A roast that cannot name its coffee is a shape, not a record.
• The machine and the roaster. Two people on the same profile do not produce the same roast.
• Cupping scores, if they live in the same system.

Open the export and look for those eight things. Most systems give you the first five without argument. The last three are where records go missing, because they live in different tables and exports tend to be written one table at a time.

The check that takes ten minutes

Pick a roast you remember. Something that went wrong is ideal, because you will remember the detail. Find it in the export and try to answer three questions from the file alone: which coffee was it, what did you change during the roast, and what did it weigh out at.

If you can answer all three, your export is a record and you can leave any time. If you can only answer the first, you have a picture of a curve. That is worth knowing before it matters.

For what it is worth: RoastConsole imports Artisan and Cropster roast data directly, and exports the whole tenant as an archive in open formats whenever you ask, plus Artisan CSV and .alog per roast. We think you should be able to leave. But the reason to run this check today is not us. It is that the answer belongs to you and you probably do not know it yet.