Coffee owner-operator - pre-purchase roaster self-check - venting, permits, the learning-curve waste, and your own time: seven pockets to empty before paying

You are an advisor who has run a roastery and eaten the
mistakes of in-shop roasting. Turn this "pre-purchase
roaster self-check" into a walk-it-before-you-pay
version for a coffee shop owner: keep the seven-pocket
structure, keep every item as "what to check / which
answers to distrust," and leave numeric slots as [ ].

Break the frame first: the true gains of in-house
roasting are the green-roasted spread plus the
signboard effect of roasting on site; the true costs
are the seven pockets below. This checklist exists not
to scare you off but to make sure every pocket has
been opened by your own hands before the money leaves.

[Pocket 1: Site and venting]
- What to check: the roaster's venting plan (duct
  routing, whether electrostatic filtration is
  required), the property rules on commercial exhaust,
  and who lives above and beside - roast smoke
  complaints from neighbors are a high-frequency event
- Distrust: "the property manager says it should be
  fine" - verbal is worthless, get it in writing; and
  check the lease for clauses barring exterior wall
  or duct changes
- What to check: machine footprint vs. doors,
  elevator, and work area; roasting workspace and a
  cooling zone
- Distrust: measuring only the machine's footprint
  and not the footprint of "a human working around
  the machine"

[Pocket 2: Energy]
- What to check: electric or gas model; for electric,
  the draw versus this shop's circuit capacity (against
  the acceptance record from move-in [ ]); for gas,
  the line retrofit and safety clearances
- Distrust: anyone breezing past "just add another
  circuit" - trust the retrofit quote and the outage
  days only once they're on paper

[Pocket 3: Compliance]
- What to check: how on-site roasting-and-selling is
  permitted locally - take the shop's business license
  and exact address to the local regulator and ask
  whether in-store roast-and-retail requires adding
  or changing any permit items
- Distrust: anyone's "every other shop does it this
  way" - administration varies by place and by shop,
  and the price of copying someone else's answer is
  yours alone. This includes this checklist: it does
  the reminding to go ask, never the answering

[Pocket 4: Capacity and learning curve]
- What to check: the shop's average daily bean use
  [ ] g converted to roasting frequency (batches per
  week); starting from zero, ask the equipment dealer
  and already-roasting peers how much coffee typically
  gets ruined before stable output, and how long
  stability takes
- Distrust: sizing capacity as "one batch holds
  [ ] kg, one roast a week covers us" with no
  allowance for the learning-curve reject rate

[Pocket 5: Green bean supply]
- What to check: minimum order quantities and lead
  times for your regular coffees; whether the shop has
  proper green storage (humidity, off-floor, pests);
  whether lot-to-lot moisture differences force curve
  re-tuning
- Distrust: leaving the working capital (MOQ x price)
  plus storage losses out of the spread math - those
  two eat the biggest bite of the green-roasted
  margin

[Pocket 6: The time account]
- What to check: roasting plus cleaning plus curve
  logging - actual hours per week; what those hours
  are worth at my current effective hourly rate [ ];
  whether roasting slots collide with rush hours
- Distrust: "I'm free anyway" - being free and
  "willing to spend [ ] fixed hours a week standing
  at the roaster" are two different things

[Pocket 7: Exit]
- What to check: disposal if the roasting stops -
  survey the used market (what the same model lists
  for, how long it takes to sell); disassembly and
  removal cost
- Distrust: counting the machine as an asset at new
  price and ignoring liquidity - used roasters move
  slower than used espresso machines as a rule

Formatting rules:
- Keep the seven pockets in order; within a pocket,
  check first, distrust second
- End every pocket with a "verdict slot": clear /
  solvable but with a pit / dealbreaker - three
  choices, left blank for me to tick
- No "good luck with the shop" ending, and no adding
  up my verdicts for me

Why it is written this way

This checklist's structural logic is "pockets to open," not "pros and cons to list," because the failure mode of the roast-your-own decision is never a mis-spread on the margin math - it's a pocket that never got opened: venting drawing neighbor complaints, circuits that can't carry the load, a permitting basis nobody asked about. Any single one turns the machine into furniture. The seven pockets cover the machine's full set of external dependencies before and after it lands, and the dealbreaker verdict slot lets each pocket stand alone: when one goes red, however beautifully the later pockets compute, the walk stops.

The compliance pocket is the most restrained, deliberately: permit administration varies by place and drifts over time, and any answer hardcoded into a checklist becomes someone's wrong basis at some shop. So that section does exactly two things - points the way ("take the address to the local regulator") and warns ("don't copy another shop's answer"), with the checklist itself declaring it won't answer the question either. That isn't evasion; it returns the answer to the only source entitled to give it.

The time account and the learning-curve waste are the two pockets most easily buried under technical romance: the spread works out to saving some amount per kilo, but the owner's standing hours each week, the beans ruined learning, the green-bean working capital and storage losses all have to be charged back against it - and quite often the math closes with in-house roasting paying the owner a wage below market. The exit pocket asks about used-market liquidity because "asset" and "asset that can be sold" become two different words on the day the roasting stops, and that line sets the true ceiling on the cost of trying and stopping.

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