If you're roasting coffee on a manual drum roaster, a sample roaster, or any setup that doesn't talk to your computer over USB, you've probably hit the same wall: every piece of "real" roast software assumes you have hardware feeding it temperatures. Artisan needs a probe interface. Cropster expects a connected roaster. Spreadsheets work, but you lose every analytic the moment you stop writing things down.
Guided Roast solves that. It's a browser-based live logger built into the First Crack web app. You read your probe with your eyes, type the number in, tap an event button when something happens, and at the end of the roast you have a full profile with rate of rise, phase durations, development time ratio, and a chart that looks identical to one captured from a Bridge-connected Kaleido or Croaster.
This article covers what Guided Roast is, what each part of the UI does, the workflow operators have settled into after months of beta testing, and when it's time to move from Guided Roast to Bridge — the desktop app that streams real sensor readings from supported hardware.
Use Guided Roast when your roaster can't connect to a computer. Manual drum roasters, sample roasters, pan roasters, hot-air popcorn-style setups, anything with a probe but no USB or Bluetooth interface — Guided Roast is the path to a logged, charted, analyzable roast without buying or building a probe interface.
What Guided Roast Replaces
Most home and small-batch roasters log their roasts somewhere between two extremes. On one end is the spreadsheet — fast, familiar, but you end up with a column of numbers that doesn't draw a chart, doesn't compute RoR, and doesn't let you compare last Tuesday's Ethiopia to this Tuesday's Ethiopia at a glance. On the other end is full hardware integration with Artisan or Cropster — accurate, automatic, and out of reach if your roaster doesn't speak a protocol any of them understand.
Guided Roast sits exactly in the middle. It's the experience of typing probe readings and tapping buttons during the roast, but with a real-time chart drawing under your fingers and the same downstream analytics a hardware-streamed roast would produce. You don't need a single cable.
The Setup Step
You start Guided Roast from the "Add Roast" menu on your dashboard or from the roasts list. The first screen asks for three things:
- —A bean — pulled from your inventory, including green weight and origin metadata.
- —A green weight for this specific batch. If you've been tracking inventory, First Crack deducts this amount when you finalize.
- —Optional: a recipe. Recipes carry target charge temp, target drop temp, and any other planned setpoints. The live HUD will show them as target lines on the chart while you roast.
That's it. There's no probe configuration, no port selection, no firmware version to match. Tap Start, and Guided Roast opens the live screen.
The Live HUD
The Guided Roast live HUD is the same chart layout you'd see if you were running Live Roast over Bridge. That's intentional — the only difference between the two is whether bean temperature arrives over a USB serial line or gets typed into a focused number field. Everything else is identical.
The main elements:
- —A big BT readout at the top. This is the number you're updating as your probe changes.
- —A typed-temp input. It's always focused. Type a number, press Enter, and the chart picks up a new data point at that temperature for the current elapsed time. Arrow keys cycle which event button is "armed" — press Enter to fire that event instead of advancing time-only.
- —An event grid — CHARGE, Turning Point, Dry End, First Crack Start, First Crack End, Second Crack Start, Second Crack End, Drop. Tap any of them when it happens. Each event records the BT and elapsed time at the moment you tap.
- —A live chart that draws the BT curve, phase color bands (drying / Maillard / development), and event markers as they land.
- —A rolling Rate of Rise computed from the last 30 seconds of typed samples. It uses the same linear-regression-over-window + exponential-smoothing + rate-limiter logic the native app uses, so the line is steady instead of sawtooth-jittery the way a naive two-point slope would be.
It is designed for one-handed operation. The keyboard does almost everything: type a number, hit Enter, tap an arrow to cycle which event is next, hit Enter to fire it.
What Phases Get Detected
Once you've logged a CHARGE event and a Dry End (or Turning Point + Dry End), Guided Roast colors the chart with phase bands:
- —Drying — charge to dry end, where the bean's moisture is driven off and the chart climbs steadily.
- —Maillard — dry end to first crack, browning reactions, color shift, RoR usually starting to decline.
- —Development — first crack to drop, the post-crack window where you choose roast level.
Phase durations and the development time ratio (development / total roast time) are computed and shown next to the chart. These are the same metrics you'd derive from a hardware-streamed roast — the only thing that changed is who measured the temperatures.
What Gets Saved
When you tap Drop and then complete the roast, Guided Roast walks you through the post-roast metadata: roasted weight, rating, notes, tags, an optional Agtron score. Submit, and the full profile syncs to your First Crack account. From there it shows up:
- —On your roast list and dashboard, exactly like a hardware-captured roast.
- —In your analytics: weight loss, RoR plots, phase trends across roasts of the same bean.
- —In your inventory — green weight is automatically deducted.
- —Available to share via a public link or publish to the community page.
- —In side-by-side comparisons against any other roast in your library.
There's no second-class citizen here. A Guided Roast profile is a real roast profile. The only thing missing is the implicit "sensor data is ground truth" — a roaster who fudges their typed readings is fudging their own dataset, the same as if they were taking notes on paper.
When to Upgrade to Bridge
Guided Roast is the right tool when:
- —Your roaster can't connect to a computer. No USB-Serial port, no Bluetooth, no protocol that Bridge or Artisan can speak — Guided Roast is the only path to a charted, analyzable roast on that kind of hardware.
- —Your roaster doesn't yet have Bridge support (we're starting with the Kaleido M-series and Croaster — more land via the beta roadmap).
- —You're roasting on something hand-tuned where typing values you already trust is fine.
- —You're brand new to logging and want to start collecting data before deciding on a hardware-integrated rig.
Bridge becomes the better tool when:
- —You're spending mental energy reading the probe instead of paying attention to the roast. With Bridge, BT and ET and RoR stream in at 1 Hz; you only look up to react.
- —You want to control the roaster from First Crack — heater, fan, drum — not just log it. Bridge sends commands; Guided Roast can't.
- —You're trying to nail consistency across batches and want sensor-level resolution instead of every-15-seconds typed snapshots.
Many testers run both: Guided Roast on the sample roaster, Bridge on the production drum. The data lands in the same library, comparisons work across both, and a recipe written from a Bridge-captured profile plays back into the next Guided Roast just the same.
To request Bridge beta access, head to firstcrack.app/beta. Approvals happen by hand — small numbers, high care.
What's Different from Logging by Hand
The honest answer: not much, mechanically. Guided Roast is a structured wrapper around the same observations a careful roaster would already be making. What changes is what happens with those observations after the roast.
A clipboard gives you a clipboard. Guided Roast gives you:
- —A curve you can look at again next week, against the curve from the week before.
- —Phase metrics computed the same way every time, so a development time ratio you compare across batches actually means the same thing each time.
- —A history that follows you to any device you sign into.
- —A recipe you can apply to your next roast.
- —A profile you can share with someone else and have them load it as a reference overlay on their own roast.
That's the upgrade. The mechanical part — type, tap, repeat — is essentially what good roasters were already doing in a notebook. Guided Roast just made the notebook talk to the rest of the platform.
FAQ
Do I need a probe at all? You need something that tells you bean temperature. A probe in the drum, a thermometer pointed at the bean mass, even a glass dial — Guided Roast is agnostic to where the number came from. The more accurate and frequent your readings, the better the chart and analytics will be.
How often should I type a reading? Every 15–30 seconds during the bulk of the roast is enough to draw a coherent curve. Every 5–10 seconds through Turning Point and again from First Crack onward will give the cleanest RoR. The RoR algorithm is smoothing-aware so missing a few samples doesn't ruin the chart, but more data is always better than less.
Can I edit the curve after the roast? No. To protect data integrity, First Crack treats logged samples as immutable once a roast finalizes. You can edit metadata — name, notes, tags, rating, bean link — but the curve and events are locked. This is the same rule that applies to Bridge-captured roasts.
Is Guided Roast free? Yes. The full First Crack web platform — Guided Roast included — is free. No subscription, no credit card. Bridge is currently in private beta and also free for approved testers; long-term pricing for Bridge has not been announced.
Ready to log your first roast? Sign in and start one — or browse the community to see what other roasters' Guided and Live profiles look like. If you'd rather read the next piece first, Live Roast with Bridge covers what changes when you upgrade to sensor-streamed roasting.