Then there are other coffees where different roasts taste different, but you can pretty much just do whatever and you'll get something nice out of it. You might like what you get more or less depending on how you roast it, but it'll still be better than what you would have gotten at the grocery store. Those are really my favorite coffees to work with because they highlight the role of the roaster as someone making intentional decisions guiding the flavor that is expressed in the cup.
The first sip confirms the expectation that this is something that I can recommend for my home roasting customers. There are some coffees where there's a very narrow range where the coffee is excellent or maybe a couple disjoint ranges of excellence that are very different from each other but both credibly good. It's hard for me to recommend those to home roasters because it's likely they won't get good results, aren't buying enough to get good at roasting it, don't have the tools they need..
Tasting my first series of roasts from the new Ethiopian coffee that arrived yesterday. For this one I've skewed my sampling toward the lighter side as that's what I expect I'll want, but I have 12 cups each at a different roast level across a broad range. Aroma is quite nice throughout the range, though the lightest 5 are closest to what I expect I'll want out of this particular coffee.
New bags of coffee arrived with the claim of "Extra Hand Picked". It seems to me that coffee is either hand picked (which is basically all of it except in Brazil) or it isn't. I'm assuming they're just using a weird term for some extra manual sorting, but that's not what the words they've chosen to use mean.
It looks like in the near future I'll be sorting out roasting plans for 6 new coffees, one or two of which I might do a couple different roast levels on, then I'll be working on 2 or 3 new or updated blend recipes. There are a few things coming where I still need to use up what I already have so I don't need to worry about doing the full product development work on those right away. I think I need one more coffee order before the end of the year still.
My personal view on this sort of technology in coffee brewing is that it can be interesting for experiments and some kinds of training, but if you feel the need to weigh all your shots of espresso something has gone very wrong and it would be worth investigating better solutions to whatever problem is leading to that decision. (Unless your using it as a theatrical prop, which is a valid artistic choice even if it's not one I would make myself.)
This is not something that I would have purchased for myself as it has far more features than a cupping scale needs (it has a bunch of modes geared toward timing and weighing espresso and manual pour over), but I also didn't have to pay for it since it was a sponsor gift connected to some teaching work.
That said, if I owned one, the stock software would have to be banished. It's not good and frankly I'm confused as to why they'd even spend the time building this, though not surprised as they've done several of these NIH software projects over the time that Typica has existed that have always come out later than planned with feature sets that completely miss the point of what people want.
Author of Typica software for coffee roasters.