If you walked into our roastery right now, you'd think we'd lost our minds.
The same coffee beans , roasted again and again and again. Different temperatures. Different time curves. Different development periods. Same green coffee, ten completely different results sitting on our cupping table.
But here's the thing , we're two weeks out from representing Australia at the Golden Bean World Series in Newcastle, and we're not leaving anything to chance.
How a Family Business from Regional NSW Ended Up on the World Stage
Let's rewind a bit. A couple of years ago we somehow found ourselves in the Golden Bean World Series—and it was a pretty unreal moment for our little family roastery in Walcha.
We ended up taking home two Silver medals at the World Series, which still feels wild to say out loud.
Even before that, we’d picked up a Silver at the Australian Golden Bean, which is what originally qualified us for the World Series in the first place—once you’re in, you’re World Series alumni, which means you’ve got the ability to enter again.
Last year the World Series was held in Guatemala, and honestly, we just weren’t organised enough (and didn’t really have the spare cash) to make it happen—plus we were flat-out opening and fitting out our roastery at the same time. But this year it’s in Newcastle—so we really have no excuse.
The Obsession Begins: Why We're Roasting the Same Coffee Over and Over
So how do you prepare for something like this? You could take your medal-winning roast profile and call it a day. But that's not how we operate at Walcha Coffee.
We wanted to know , could we push our roasting even further? Could we unlock something we hadn’t found yet?
And just to be super clear—we’re not dusting off old beans or leaning on last year’s profiles. For this year’s World Series run, we’ve spent months sourcing and selecting unique, different coffees specifically for this competition. That’s the whole point: new coffees, dialled-in from scratch, until they’re singing.
That’s when the work really starts.
We take the same green coffee and roast it in small batches across a tight range of profiles. We’re talking about changing nearly everything: charge temperature, rate of rise, development time ratio, and drop point—then cupping ruthlessly to see what’s genuinely best in the cup.
Here’s what a typical day looks like for me right now:
- I’ve been doing most of the roasting on a small sample roaster, working from home—just hammering through trial roasts.
- I’m roasting around 20 separate samples a day.
- At the moment I’m working with five different coffees that have taken us months to source and select.
Over the coming week, I’ll be spending a lot of time in Sydney workshoping the final roasts with my business partner and master coffee roaster Sharon Jan—who honestly has one of the best palates in coffee, and is also a seriously accomplished coffee taster and coffee judge.
The goal is to narrow everything down over the next week so we can lock in our final entries.
What We're Actually Learning (It's Not What We Expected)
You might think after roasting coffee professionally for years, we'd have it all figured out. But here's what this process reinforces every time we do it , every single variable matters more than you think—especially when you’re roasting for a judging table.
Charge Temperature Changes Everything
Charge temperature—the temperature the beans enter the roaster at—is step one for us, and it has a direct relationship to batch size. Dialling that starting point in is crucial because it dictates the speed of the entire roast, which then flows straight through the drying phase, Maillard, and development.
And it’s never just “set and forget”. We’re balancing charge temperature against the moisture content and density of the specific coffee in front of us—because different coffees absorb and release heat in totally different ways.
For example, with the Pink Bourbon I’m working on right now, I’m running a slightly lower charge temperature for the batch size. That lets me draw out the Maillard phase just a touch longer—which is the key to pushing that extra sweetness in the final cup profile.
That’s the level of precision we’re chasing for our World Series entries.
Temperature Isn't Everything
We always knew temperature mattered, but what we're seeing is that how quickly you reach certain temperature points matters just as much. You can hit the same final temperature two different ways and get two completely different coffees.
The Sweet Spot Moves
The "perfect" roast isn't static. Depending on what you're trying to highlight in the coffee (fruit notes, chocolate, caramel, florals), the ideal profile changes. There's no single "best" roast. There's the best roast for what you want to achieve.
The Cupping Table Tells No Lies
Every afternoon, we set up our cupping table with the previous day's roasts. This is where the rubber meets the road.
Cupping is the industry-standard way to taste and evaluate coffee. You grind the beans, pour hot water over them, let them steep, break the crust, and then slurp the coffee from a spoon to spray it across your palate. It looks (and sounds) a bit ridiculous, but it's the most effective way to really taste what's in the cup.
Some days, the differences are obvious immediately. Other days, it's subtle , a slight shift in mouthfeel, a hint of sweetness that wasn't there before, a cleaner finish.
We take notes. Lots of notes. We debate. Sometimes we disagree (that's the fun part of being a family business , you can have passionate arguments and still sit down for dinner together). But slowly, we're narrowing in on what works.
Why This Matters for a Premium Handcrafted Roaster
Look, we could have stuck with a previously successful profile. It's a great roast. But that's not what Walcha Coffee is about.
We're not a massive commercial roastery pushing out thousands of kilos a day. We're a small, family-run business that hand-roasts every batch. When we say "premium handcrafted," we mean it. This process , this obsessive, time-consuming, slightly mad process , is exactly what that means.
It means:
- We're willing to roast the same coffee ten different ways to find the absolute best expression
- We don't take shortcuts
- We care more about quality than efficiency
- Every batch gets the attention it deserves
Being from regional NSW, we don't have the foot traffic of a Sydney or Melbourne roastery. We don't have the same visibility. What we do have is the commitment to do things properly. That's our competitive advantage.
What Happens Next
In two weeks, we’ll be heading to Newcastle for the Golden Bean World Series with our final, pre-roasted competition entries—sealed, labelled, and ready to be judged.
The coffees are assessed by a panel of international experts, and that’s exactly why we’re putting in the hours now: the roasting is done before we get there, and once they’re in, they’re in.
Are we nervous? Absolutely. But we're also incredibly proud. Proud that a family business from a small town in regional NSW gets to represent Australian coffee roasting on the world stage. Proud of the work we've put in. Proud of what we've learned through this process.
And here's the thing , no matter how we place at the World Series, this experiment has already changed how we approach roasting. We've pushed ourselves further than we have in years. We've discovered nuances in coffee that we'd previously missed. We've proven to ourselves that there's always room to improve, always something new to learn.
That's what makes specialty coffee so exciting. You can roast for decades and still find something that surprises you.
The Walcha Coffee Difference
This journey , from regional NSW to the world stage , represents everything we believe in at Walcha Coffee. We're not trying to be the biggest. We're trying to be the best at what we do.
Every bag of coffee we roast carries this same obsessive attention to detail. Whether it's our Thunderbolt Blend or a single-origin we're preparing for competition, the approach is the same: small batches, careful profiling, constant improvement.
We're not just roasting coffee. We're crafting an experience, one batch at a time.
So yeah, we might look a bit crazy right now, roasting the same coffee ten different ways. But that's what it takes to compete at the highest level. That's what it takes to create truly exceptional coffee.
And honestly? We wouldn't have it any other way.
Want to taste what all this obsessive roasting produces? Check out our range of premium handcrafted coffee : every bean roasted with the same care and attention we're bringing to the World Series.