Roast Summit 2026 | Melbourne, Australia

Oct 15

This event brought together coffee professionals for an immersive experience in the art and science of coffee roasting.

Roast Summit Melbourne was held in-person on March 24-25, 2026, hosted in partnership with Anne Cooper of Equilibrium Master Roasters and event sponsor Loring.

Event Location

Aunty Peg’s (Proud Mary Coffee Roasters)
200 Wellington St.
Collingwood, VIC 3066
Melbourne, Australia

Event Program

Day One

Badge pickup and morning coffee.
Day one introduction.
Moderators Anne Cooper and Caleb Holstein lead a discussion on planning, buying, and managing your green coffee as a roaster in the “new” market. Discussions will cover the state of the current green coffee market (since Roast Summit 2025), looking at the reasons behind it and exploring how roasters can continue to manage their costs and move forward sustainably as an industry.
Panelists:
- Anne Cooper/Moderator, Equilibrium Master Roasters
- Caleb Holstein/Moderator, Greensquare
- Joe Tynan, Cafe Imports
- Andre Selga, Southland Coffee
- Nadia Moreira, Southland Coffee
- Khalid Oozeer, Bennetts Coffee
- Daniel Vella, Inter-American
- Mark Howard, Caravela
- Daniel Vergnano, List-Beisler
- Emilie Coulombe, Sucafina
- Matt Slater, Condesa Co. Lab
Moderators Anne Cooper and Caleb Holstein lead a discussion on planning, buying, and managing your green coffee as a roaster in the “new” market. Discussions will cover the state of the current green coffee market (since Roast Summit 2025), looking at the reasons behind it and exploring how roasters can continue to manage their costs and move forward sustainably as an industry.
Panelists:
- Anne Cooper/Moderator, Equilibrium Master Roasters
- Caleb Holstein/Moderator, Greensquare
- Joe Tynan, Cafe Imports
- Andre Selga, Southland Coffee
- Nadia Moreira, Southland Coffee
- Khalid Oozeer, Bennetts Coffee
- Daniel Vella, Inter-American
- Mark Howard, Caravela
- Daniel Vergnano, List-Beisler
- Emilie Coulombe, Sucafina
- Matt Slater, Condesa Co. Lab
Provided at Aunty Peg’s
Moderator Connie Blumhardt will lead a selected panel of roasting machine manufacturers—Loring, Probat, Giesen, CRA/Phantom, Roest—where they will highlight current and future innovations in their roasting technology, any challenges they may have identified, and give their hot take on what the future of roasting machine manufacturing looks like.
Panelists
- Lachlan Cox-Tuck, Loring
- Alexander Scholtz, Probat
- Richard Muhl, Giesen
- Mark Beattie, Phantom
- Scott Burchell, Loring
- Rhys Evans, Roest
Presented by Anne Cooper, Equilibrium Master Roasters
With the price of coffee increasing, now more than ever, we don’t have the luxury of running multiple batches to get a roast right when dialing in a new coffee—the pressure is on to get a roast profile set using as little coffee as possible and as fast as possible.
Crippled by constant uncertainty—how do we know we are on the right track?—and with no real industry standards in place for coffee roasting or creating a “standard” roast profile, the overall goal of this session is to encourage a more defined, industry-wide accepted methodology for coffee roasting and roast profile standards.
Anne Cooper of Equilibrium Master Roasters will address the current state of coffee roasting education and “standards,” and how we can improve upon this and better support the roasting community with clearer roasting education standards and objectives on how to turn flavor intentions into definitive roasting decisions.
As a group, we will discuss and explore this by:
- defining a roasting standard
- showing what a roasting standard should or could look like
- defining key data to focus on to successfully dial in a roast profile for any bean efficiently, every time, and on any roasting system
We will then discuss and prepare for the very specific, focused tasting exercises on Day 2 that will demonstrate how we can decisively implement clearer standards in the roasting industry.

Day Two

9:00 - 9:15 AM | Welcome

On day two, four groups will rotate between the following workshops:

Coffee Tasting 1: Sample Roasts
One of the most profound and heartbreaking things ever said by a coffee producer is that “potential sales are lost and a lifetime of hard work on the farm is often undone in minutes by a roaster’s bad sample roast.”
Additionally, the most failed exam among Q Graders was the Roast ID exam, because the control (which was meant to be a sample roast) was thought to be the over-roasted example, and the light roast was thought to be the control or sample roast.
So, what is the best roast level and profile recipe for a sample roast that best represents a producer’s lifetime of work?
To determine what we as an industry are actually using or preferring to use as a sample roast level, roasters will taste and then choose their favorite from a range of sample roasts, from the recommended SCA sample level to everything else that is currently being used in roasteries.
Roasters will also have the opportunity to chat with QC industry experts Jessica Giacetti/Sucafina and Georgia Major/Bennetts Coffee and ask any questions about green beans, quality control, etc.
Coffee Tasting 2: The Impact of Time in Roasting
Time is everything in coffee roasting.
To drive home the importance of time in roasting, roasters will taste samples of the same coffee with the same end temperature and color, but with different roast times, which will produce different flavors or expressions of certain flavors.
Roasters will be asked to identify which sample has more acidity, which has more sweetness, which has the most balance, and which they prefer overall.
This tasting will help roasters better connect with the fact that roasting coffee is all about rate, and that roasting coffee either fast or slow has a clear impact on flavor expression.
Roasters will also have the opportunity to chat with roasting industry expert Anne Cooper of Equilibrium Master Roasters and ask any questions about roasting.
Coffee Tasting 3: Defining Roast Level Standards for Today’s Market
With an enormous amount of change challenging our industry, it has been commented that the “old rules of roasting don’t apply anymore,” and the way we communicate about roasting has evolved.
It could be said that roasting is now more about a roast level that can be made with a certain brew recipe on any given piece of coffee-making equipment—as in, who’s to stop someone from putting a dark roast through a filter and a light roast through an espresso machine? In essence, there is no such thing as an “espresso roast” anymore, but rather a roast level that can be extracted in many different ways.
Together, we need to identify and agree on the difference between the roast levels we’re currently roasting in order to help create a clearer definition of what these roast levels look like as a standard roast profile.
Roasters will taste examples of the different roast levels and be asked to identify which they think is light, medium, medium-dark, and dark.
Roasters will also have the opportunity to chat with barista training and brewing industry expert Charles Skadiang from Melbourne Coffee Academy and ask any questions about extraction and brew recipes for the different roast levels.
Following on from the very popular mentoring-style discussion sessions at last year’s Roast Summit, roasters will be led by Caleb Holstein and a guest trader to gather and talk about their own experiences with the current market. This session will help roasters in the group learn through hearing about others’ experiences and provide solutions that can be applied in the workplace.