How do I go from barista to roaster with no roasting experience?

The roasting jobs that get advertised are the ones nobody inside the company wanted. The first roasting job almost always comes from inside a roastery you are already in, doing something else. So the path is: get into the building, then move.

The route that works most often:

1. Take any production role at a roastery. Packing, weighing green, running the bagging line, quality control cupping prep. The job title is irrelevant; the door is not.
2. Ask to cup. Most roasteries cup daily or weekly. Being the person who always shows up to cup, takes notes and can describe a defect is how you get noticed by the head roaster.
3. Learn the machine while cleaning it. Chaff, cyclone, cooling tray. The person who cleans the roaster knows the roaster. Ask to shadow the warm-up and the first batch of the day.
4. Log everything. Keep your own notebook of charge temperature, first crack, development time, and what you tasted. You will be asked "what did you notice" and this is the answer.
5. Do Sensory Foundation before Roasting Foundation. Roasteries hire palates, not button-pressers. Sensory is also the cheaper course.
6. Cover a holiday. Head roasters go on leave. Being the person who can run a production day alone once is the whole "one year of experience".

How long it takes: 6–18 months from packing to running batches, in a small roastery. Big roasteries are slower and more siloed; small ones let you touch everything.

Two things that shortcut it:

• A home roaster (even a modified popcorn machine or a 100 g sample roaster) plus a cupping habit. Bring your own roast to the cupping table and ask for brutal feedback.
• Offering to roast for the shop you already work in, if it buys green. Many cafés dream of roasting in-house and never start; you can be the reason they do.

Pay reality check: a first production roaster role is often the same hourly rate as a good barista, sometimes lower. The upside comes two years in, at head roaster or production manager level.