Time flies when you’re roasting.
It was exactly 10 years ago to the day that Daily Coffee News shared the news of the launch of Modulating the Flavor Profile of Coffee, the first book from longtime coffee roaster and consultant Rob Hoos that would become a seminal text in the roasting field.
Now we’re here to share news of the launch of Hoos’s latest book, Cultivar: A Practical Guide for Coffee Roasters.
(Publisher’s note: DCN or its affiliates do not stand to make any money off the book’s publication; we just think Rob does awesome work that generally benefits professional coffee roasters.)
As the new book’s title suggests, it is focused on specific coffee cultivars, i.e. cultivated varieties of coffee that are commonly found in the green coffee marketplace.
“The entire intention of this book is practical,” Hoos recently told DCN. “My goal is that it could help guide coffee roasters to understand better what flavors are possible from different cultivars, to guide their buying, and how to approach roasting them well — faster, so they can reduce the coffee waste and product development time.”
The book stems from a project Hoos launched with his Iteration.Coffee company in 2023, now called the Cultivar Project, which turned into a large-scale profile-development and flavor study focused on coffee cultivars.
The project involved sourcing as many distinct cultivars from the same farms as possible, and ensuring consistent post-harvest processing in order to isolate cultivar as the primary variable.
Hoos repeated the process across multiple farms and countries, while also comparing the same cultivars grown and processed — always “washed” or “wet” process — in different regions.
Over more than 600 days, Hoos conducted 309 roasts on the same roaster, analyzing 31 coffees from six farms in four different coffee-producing countries.
The Cultivar book combines this large-scale analysis with Hoos’s 16 years of professional roasting experience, as well as 12 years of consulting work.
“This book provides flavor expectations for many common cultivars — not an exhaustive list, but a practical one — along with preliminary roasting recommendations,” Hoos said. “I also explore how to approach coffees based on processing method and terroir. Unlike Modulating, where I was more open-ended in my findings, Cultivar is explicit. I provide clear roasting approaches for those looking to fine-tune their profiles. The goal? To help roasters get to a flavor profile they’re happy with, faster.”
Hoos stressed the potential practical applications of the book and the research therein, saying, “Personally, after this research, I can confidently dial in a coffee within three roasts — a skill I want to pass along to others.”
The 57-page book Cultivar is available in hardcover for direct online sales in the U.S. and European markets, while a digital-only version is also available.
For roasters wishing to dig deeper into the research, Hoos has also released Cultivar Project: Field Notes from Iteration.coffee, a 589-page hardcover book that compiles all the data, roast profiles, tasting notes and additional experiments from the Cultivar Project.
Hoos and Iteration.Coffee, meanwhile, are planning on some additional deep digging into other corners of the coffee world.
Said Hoos, “Next my research switches gears to begin focusing more on modulating darker roasts, and beginning to explore non-arabica species of coffee with the same rigor I have arabica.”
Comments? Questions? News to share? Contact DCN’s editors here. For all the latest coffee industry news, subscribe to the DCN newsletter.
Related Posts
Nick Brown
Nick Brown is the editor of Daily Coffee News by Roast Magazine.
