tilauscope_fork
BeanCave — your green coffee
!!! abstract “Artisan does / TilauScope adds” Artisan does — stores the coffee as free text in each roast file. Two roasts of the same bag are two unrelated strings, and nothing knows how much of that bag is left.
**TilauScope adds** — BeanCave: a record per green coffee, with an identity that every roast
of it points back to. That identity is what makes the rest possible — stock that goes down as
you roast, a [roast plan](/the-roast-plan.html) that learns from previous roasts of *this* coffee,
and a history you can read.
BeanCave is where a TilauScope setup begins. It opens from TilauScope → BeanCave, and the first time it opens it runs the first-time setup wizard.
The three tabs
| Tab | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Green Beans | The catalogue and the bean records. This chapter. |
| Roasts | Every roast, grouped by day and searchable, and reading one back — curve, statistics, tasting. See After the roast. |
| Storage | How your coffee is keeping: water activity, conditioning, sack labels — see Sacks, stock and conservation. |
The catalogue
The Green Beans tab is where you choose what to roast. The catalogue is a readable list, not a spreadsheet: each coffee on three compact lines — its name, its origin, then what decides the next roast.
Search — Search name, country, farm… filters as you type.
Show — Show: in stock narrows the list to what you can actually roast today; Show: all coffees brings the rest back. A coffee you have finished stays in the database, with its history intact: out-of-stock coffees always sit at the bottom of the list, and while only the stock is shown they fold behind one line, Out of stock · 6 coffees, which brings them back.
Sort — Sort: To roast first puts on top the coffee that keeps worst: a water activity flagged as a storage risk first, then the oldest harvest, then the coffee left longest since its last roast — a coffee never roasted comes before any. Sort: Name lists them alphabetically. Both choices are remembered.
When BeanCave opens, or when you come back to it, it selects the coffee loaded in TilauScope for the current roast, if that coffee is in the catalogue. Otherwise the record shows the first coffee of the list as filtered and sorted. If none matches, the record is empty.
Double-click a coffee to open the Roasts tab narrowed to its roasts. A single click only selects it: the Roasts tab keeps whatever it was showing.
Each entry’s third line reads the stock in grams and in batches — ≈ 2 batches, at the weight of the coffee’s last roast — then when it was last roasted, or not roasted yet, and a dot for its water activity: green when typical, amber or red when it sits outside the usual range, with the word that says why, grey when it was never measured. Badges answer the remaining questions: TO TASTE when the last roast has rested past its degassing and has not been tasted yet, BLEND, and the year of a harvest two or more years old — Harvest is 2 years old.
!!! note An empty list after filtering says so — No bean matches the current filter. — rather than looking like an empty database.
If the library’s file cannot be read when BeanCave opens — damaged, or not readable on this computer — BeanCave says so and saves nothing over it until it is repaired or restored and BeanCave reopened. Adding a coffee to an empty catalogue at that moment would otherwise replace every coffee on file with that one.
The bean record
A record opens to be read, not to be edited. It is laid out in two columns that fit whole in a small window, and each zone has its own ✎ Edit dialog — so correcting an altitude does not mean re-opening a form with forty fields in it. On a taller window the sheet spreads out rather than leaving its zones cramped at the top.
| Zone | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Essentials | Name, origin, process and supplier; stock (with the batches it still makes), crop year, SCA score and number of roasts as tiles; the flavour notes and the roasting memo. Hovering the stock shows what it is worth once a price is entered. The ✎ beside the flavour notes edits the score, the notes and the memo. |
| Roast memory | The coffee’s last roast — see below. |
| Characteristics | Process, species, varieties and screen size; density, humidity and water activity as tiles with their meaning; a blend’s components as one bar; the bean family and what it does to the pace of the roast. |
| Provenance | Farm, altitude, supplier, purchase price. |
| Sacks | The labels of this coffee’s bags, when it has any, and 🌱 New crop — see Sacks, stock and conservation. |
Under the record, Roast this coffee opens the roast setup sheet for it, and Plan opens the same sheet on its PLAN tab, to see — and compare — what a batch of it would look like before roasting it. Share & print holds the bean label, its QR code and the shareable card; the bin at the far end deletes the record, after asking.
Each zone’s edit button states what it covers — Edit name, origin, year and stock, Edit farm, supplier, altitude and price — so there is no guessing which dialog holds which field. Editing a zone changes only that zone: Only this section is changed. Save writes the record immediately.
Weighing and measuring from the record
Stock accepts a live weight: with a scale configured, clicking the ⚖ reading captures the exact figure instead of a typed approximation — With a scale configured, click the ⚖ reading to capture the exact weight.
Density can be measured the same way, from a fixed-volume container, with Measure. If no scale is set up, the dialog says so plainly — No scale configured — rather than offering a button that does nothing.
An unmeasured density now reads not measured, and the roast plan leaves the coffee’s structure alone rather than treating the empty field as a very light bean. Records saved before this change carried 500 g/l for “empty”; they are cleared the first time the cave is opened, so a coffee whose density you did measure at that figure needs entering again.
Water activity can be measured directly from the record with an AquaGauge. What the value means for storage is in Sacks, stock and conservation.
Density, Humidity and Water activity each read back what the figure means, in plain words, right after the value: 790 g/l (dense), 12.4 % (moist), 0.54 (typical). It appears both in the Characteristics zone of the record and in the fields you edit. The comment turns amber when the value sits outside the usual range, and red when a water activity is high enough to be a storage risk. The bands are the same ones the roast plan and the coach’s advice use, so a value never reads normal in one place and is flagged in the other. An unmeasured value says nothing.
Flavour notes are entered on the flavour wheel rather than typed as free text, which keeps the vocabulary consistent from one coffee to the next.
Price and screen size
Price is what the green coffee cost per kg, in the currency chosen in Configuration. Once it is entered, hovering the stock on the record shows what the remaining stock is worth, and each roast of this coffee shows what its green cost — see After the roast. Leave it at 0 if you do not know it; nothing else depends on it.
Screen size is picked from a short list — Large — AA, Supremo, 17/18+, Medium — AB, Excelso, 15/16, Small — 14/15 and below, Peaberry — PB — using whatever the supplier’s sheet states. Leave it on Unknown when the sheet says nothing. When a roast of this coffee is prepared, the size is written into the roast’s properties, so it stays with the roast file. It does not change the roast plan.
!!! info “Hardware” Live weighing needs a Bluetooth scale; density measurement needs a scale configured as scale 1 in Artisan; water activity needs an AquaGauge. Everything else on the record is typed.
Adding a coffee
Add — expert form, in the menu of the + New bean button at the top of the catalogue, asks how you want to start: From current fields, which pre-fills from what you have already typed, or Blank bean, which starts fresh. A full expert form follows, with required fields named up front — Fill the required fields (*): name, country, category, process, species, varieties — and the reassurance that matters when a bag has just arrived: Fill what you know — everything can be refined later from the sheet.
Blends are declared as such, with their components and ratios.
Origins, processes, varieties and blend components are picked from fixed lists, the same in every editor. A process, variety or component the list does not carry — one typed freely in an older record, or read from a supplier’s page — is shown and saved as Other.
!!! tip “The guided way in” For a bag that has just arrived, a click on + New bean itself is the better route: it opens the New sack assistant, which walks through registering a new coffee, restocking an existing one, or opening a new crop year, and reviews everything before saving. The expert form exists for when you know exactly what you are entering. See Sacks, stock and conservation for the assistant in full.
When the coffee is already in the catalogue and this is simply its next harvest, select it and
use **🌱 New crop**, on the Sacks line of its record, instead: it inherits everything that does not change and asks only for the
new year, the weight, the price and the measurements of the lot.
Filling a record from the supplier’s page
Rather than copying a dozen fields by hand, paste the supplier’s URL — Enter URL of supplier here… — and TilauScope fills the record from that page, blends, component ratios and screen size included. The price is never filled in: a shop page often prices a 250 g bag, sometimes in another currency, so it is left for you to enter. The result is presented for review before anything is saved.
!!! note This needs an AI provider configured — see Configuration. Extraction reads a web page written for humans, so check the result: it is a first draft to correct, not an authority.
The link is cleaned before it is used. Shops append a great deal to an address — campaign tags, click identifiers, and sometimes a customer, order or session reference tying the page to you — and all of that is removed: what is fetched and sent for extraction is the product page itself. Paste the link as you copied it; there is nothing to tidy up by hand.
Only a public supplier page can be read. An address on your own network, or a link that is not http or https, is refused with a message rather than fetched — that page would be handed to an outside service, and nothing on your network belongs there. A link that looks public but leads to your own network, by a redirection or by the name it points to, is refused on the same grounds.
The first time a supplier page is sent to a given AI provider, TilauScope names that provider and says what the request carries before anything leaves — see Configuration.
The roast history of a coffee
The Roast memory zone recalls the coffee’s last roast: its date, the level it ran at — read from how long it developed and how hot it was dropped, not from its colour — and its weight, then its development, weight loss and colour. What follows depends on where that roast stands:
- Not roasted yet — the first plan starts from the coffee’s characteristics.
- Rested, not tasted — Rested 6 days — how did it taste? with Taste…, which opens the tasting of that roast.
- Tasted — what was tasted, for example Tasted 18 Sep: Flat, papery, and the one change the next roast makes: Next time: Burner one notch higher before first crack.
All 4 roasts → opens the Roasts tab narrowed to this coffee — curve, key events, statistics and tasting; see After the roast for what it shows. This is the same history the roast plan learns from, which is why keeping records attached to the right coffee matters: a roast filed against the wrong bag teaches the plan the wrong lesson.
Sharing and printing
A bean record can be exported as a landscape image sized for social networks, and so can a roast — green coffee, roast level, key figures and the curve on one card (see After the roast for the roast card).
Labels for beans, roasts and sacks print from here — a bean’s from Share & print on its record — each carrying a QR code that opens the corresponding record. The 📷 SCAN button reads those codes with the webcam; a phone camera works too — see Labels and QR for printing and scanning in full.
!!! note Printing and scanning are optional throughout. A setup that never prints a label never sees a prompt about one.
Roast files
Auditing incomplete roast files, linking one to a green coffee, and recomputing how many roasts each coffee has is not a BeanCave tab — it opens from TilauScope → Roast Profile Maintenance…. See Repairing incomplete roast files.
Next
- What to configure so all of this works: see Configuration.
- Tracking bags and keeping condition: see Sacks, stock and conservation.
- Printing and scanning labels: see Labels and QR.
- Generating a plan for a coffee: see The roast plan.
- Roasting it: see Preparing a roast.