Ok, so I ordered from Sweet Maria’s. I went to the “Discover Beans” section of the Roast World and I found my EXACT bean. Unfortunately, there’s three beans with identical names, and none of them have the same description as the Sweet Maria’s page. Then I realize that these beans are last year’s crop (all three). So, do I create another bean, or are we all just using the one from last year?
Also, WHY AREN’T THE DISTRIBUTORS LOADING BEANS INTO ROAST WORLD? We don’t need three users uploading multiple versions of the same bean, sometimes with incomplete data. Who better to make the “official” bean entry than the distributor themselves? Sweet Maria’s is the #1 US supplier for bullets and the #1 US supplier for beans on Roast World. It makes sense that they’d load all their beans into Roast World, like other suppliers do with Roast Path. They’d sell more Bullets, and even more coffee to Bullet owners if all their offerings were conveniently located on Roast World the moment the coffee is listed on their site. Picture a Roast World link at the bottom of the bean’s “specs” that would take you straight to the correct bean. Adding new purchases to your inventory would be silky smooth.
I know this is turning into a bit of a rant, but if Roast Path has suppliers entering bean data, and Ikawa has a similar thing going on, surely the Roast World community can find a way to be more effective with bean data management.
Actually, every single bean in my recent order has duplicates. For instance, the name “Guatemala San Martin Jilotepeque” has six entries. One has no recorded roasts, four others have a handful of roasts each, and the last one has 39 roasts. All entries with recorded roasts have been actively roasted in the past 2 months (most within the last week). They have various levels of information loaded, but it looks like they’re all the same crop and entries that include descriptions appear to be the same.
If we’re trying to share common experiences between users with the same roaster and bean combination, dividing up our pool of “roasts” with duplicate entries isn’t helping us achieve that.
The duplicate beans is an issue that we’re aware of and have been actively trying to reduce duplicates.
I’m currently working on adding the functionality to merge duplicate beans together (this is not as simple as it might seem). This should help us clean up the bean duplicates that currently exists.
Also, we introduced some changes to the bean creator to strongly encourage users to use existing beans rather than create duplicates. Both functionality will be released along with the next release of RT.
On this note, I’ve always found adding a new bean to be cumbersome and not intuitive. If the process could be simplified/streamlined, that would be most helpful.
Thanks.
I wish we could download a bean but then make local edits. For example, I have a Rooftop Dried Yemen Hawari from Royal Coffee. I found the bean in RW, so just imported it, but then noticed that it is spelled Roooftop Dried. Ugh! I tried correcting it on my system, but could not. Now, I have to very consciously ignore the misspelling every time I roast this very delicious bean.
I think one challenge is that cupping notes from the vendor changes from crop to crop year (i.e. it’s like wine vintage year tasting notes from the professionals). I think part of the problem is that people are creating duplicates because of that difference in the information they have from their bean vendor/supplier. We are dealing with an organic and natural crop so it’s not going to be the “same” year on year because of climate. You also have a field for lot number (If I remember correctly) and if someone sees an entry with a different lot number they might create a new one instead. It’s tough data model to design when there is a constant (bean name and supplier) and there is variable data (year over year cupping note, lot number, etc) in the meta data for what is essentially the same “thing”. Sorry to geek out a bit there
Today I had a look in my bean inventory and one of “my beans” that I manually entered has been edited by someone else and the bean description is now different then before.
On the right side of the bean detail page I can see that another roaster has roasted this bean 11 days ago. So I assume that he edited the description field, too.
In my opinion it only make sense if we have a common shared bean database, with information filled in from the distributors at best
OR
everyone could have his own bean database, where no one else can mis-edited my comments.
Since Thompson (Tom) is such a huge supporter of the Bullet, I bought mine from Sweet Maria’s, and he provides a wealth of information to his customers, my guess is, he may already be doing it. If not, I think he’d be fully behind it.
Many of the green bean purveyors (whether they focus on home roasters or wholesale) provides loads of information about the beans they are selling. Some may even go as far as basing their descriptions on that year’s crop and their own cupping (if I recall Burman does this sometimes in their notes). Is it possible to pull from them, maybe but only if they provide some kind of API or endpoint to pull that information - however, I am not sure many of these purveyors’ technology is sophisticated enough to provide that service.
I once asked SM if there is a way to download their bean notes and the spider graph, the response I got is currently no, but they are thinking about it. They are after all in the business of selling beans not being a tech company so I’m not going to expect such capability for a long while.
It’s a bit of a data modeling and permissioning problem - what is “core data” that shouldn’t change and what is allowed to change down to which level of granularity of the data that is allowed to change and who “owns” what. Not trivial… I’m dealing with some of the same issues right now on a project in my day job
I emailed SM to see if they’d add bean data into roast.world. They said they didn’t have the time. Its probably 5 mins of work for each new bean they add, so it really isn’t a lot of effort and I feel like the value added would benefit them greatly …as they’re basically the only dealer of bullets in the US, and they try to sell bullet owners their green coffee
