Rob Hoos Puts a Roasting Mentor in Your Pocket with New AI-Powered App
Most coffee roasters learn the craft the hard way: alone at a machine, making expensive mistakes, wishing someone with experience was standing next to them. Rob Hoos has spent years trying to change that through books, courses, and one-on-one consulting. Now he is putting a version of that guidance directly into roasters’ pockets with new iOS and Android apps for Roasting Lab — and an AI assistant trained on his own materials.
The apps, launched this week, extend Hoos’s three-year-old online community platform to mobile devices. But the more interesting addition is an artificial intelligence tool that draws exclusively from Hoos’s published books, training materials, and accumulated Roasting Lab forum discussions. When a roaster asks about tipping, airflow, or translating a profile to a different machine, the AI pulls from that specific body of work rather than generic internet information.
A Roasting Consultant in Your Phone
Hoos has built a reputation in specialty coffee as someone who can explain complex roasting science in practical terms. His book “Modulating the Flavor Profile of Coffee” has become a standard reference for roasters trying to understand how to control flavor development. Other titles — “Cultivar,” “Field Notes,” “Airflow & Coffee,” “Tipping and Its Avoidance,” “Exploring the Dark Side” — cover the technical terrain that production roasters navigate daily.
The new AI assistant consolidates that material into a tool that can answer questions in real time. A roaster dealing with a roast defect can describe what they are seeing and get feedback grounded in Hoos’s methodology. Someone trying to hit a specific flavor target can work through the variables without scheduling a consulting call.
Hoos has been clear that the AI is not a replacement for human mentorship. He still personally monitors Roasting Lab’s forums and responds to most posts. The AI handles flagging and content monitoring, but the community’s value comes from actual professionals helping each other solve problems.
Who It’s For
Roasting Lab targets a wide range of practitioners. Hoos describes the audience as “anyone who is serious about their coffee roasting,” from home roasters working with 50-gram batches to commercial operators handling 300-kilogram roasts. The tiered membership structure reflects that range.
The entry-level Community tier runs from $10 to $60 per month (or $100 to $600 per year) and includes access to general forums, a job board, an equipment marketplace, a book club, and a 17-lesson Foundations course. Members can dig into archived recordings of mentorship meetings, roasting lectures, and book club discussions.
Higher tiers add topic-specific forums covering roast defects, flavor targets, machine profile translation, and production challenges. These members also get more direct feedback from Hoos, additional courses, live sessions, and discounts on one-on-one consulting.
Why This Matters
The specialty coffee industry has always had a knowledge-distribution problem. Experienced roasters accumulate hard-won expertise that typically stays within their own operations or passes informally to apprentices. Formal education exists — SCA courses, roaster-specific certifications — but ongoing professional development often means figuring things out through trial and error.
Roasting Lab represents a different model: a community of practice built around a central expert who actively shapes and responds to the conversation. The AI layer extends that further by making Hoos’s accumulated knowledge searchable and conversational.
Whether an AI trained on one consultant’s materials can genuinely substitute for hands-on mentorship remains an open question. But for a roaster troubleshooting a stubborn defect at 6 a.m. before their production run starts, having access to searchable expertise — grounded in practical experience rather than generic chatbot knowledge — is worth something real.
The apps are available now on iOS and Android. The AI assistant is accessible to Roasting Lab members at all tiers.