Local coffee roaster in Portland switched to AI sorting and the difference is wild

I go to this small roaster on Division Street. They used to have a guy picking out bad beans by hand, took all day. Six months ago they set up a computer vision sorter. Now the batch consistency is way tighter, no burnt bits in my morning cup. Has anyone else seen a real quality jump after automation hit their local spot?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_nina22d agoMost Upvoted

My buddy runs a cafe over in Eugene and he told me their roaster swapped to a machine sorter last year. He said the first week the thing flagged some perfectly good beans as bad and tossed them, so they had to dial it back. But after that, the real issue was the roaster started zoning out during the roast, letting the machine run the show too much. My friend stopped buying from them because the coffee got boring, like all the character got scrubbed out. That hand sorter might have been slow, but he knew the beans inside out and caught weird stuff the camera just glides over.

grace_bailey22d ago

Tight batch consistency just means every batch is equally mediocre now. That hand sorter caught subtle defects the machine misses, like off flavors from beans that look fine but taste like cardboard. Plus those six months probably saw way less human oversight on the roasting side since they trusted the sorter too much.

eric7231d ago

And @the_nina's buddy basically proved it, the machine can't tell when a bean's got that flat taste because it looks fine on the surface. All the weird little imperfections that made each batch interesting are gone now, just a smooth boring cup every time. The hand sorter catching those cardboard beans was what kept the coffee worth drinking, even if it meant some inconsistency.