Inside Roast Summit May 2026 at the Diedrich Education Facility
Roast Summit May 2026 brought coffee professionals together at the Diedrich education facility in Chicago for two days of learning, roasting, connection, and hands-on skill building.
Hosted in partnership with Roast Magazine, this sold-out event continues to fill an important space in the coffee industry: a dedicated gathering where coffee professionals can learn from experienced presenters, exchange ideas with peers, build practical skills, and deepen their understanding of coffee roasting in a collaborative setting.
This year’s attendance also reflected the continued growth of Roast Summit’s reach, with participation expanding beyond the U.S. and bringing more coffee professionals into the conversation.
Across the two-day summit, attendees engaged with timely, high-quality presentations addressing some of the most relevant challenges and opportunities facing the roasting industry today, including decaffeinated coffee, green coffee longevity, roast development, sensory evaluation, high-market pricing pressure, roasting fundamentals, sourcing strategy, blending, and cost management without sacrificing quality.
The sessions connected research, real-world business conditions, and practical roasting application in a way that gave participants both deeper insight and immediately usable tools.
One of the strongest parts of Roast Summit continues to be the hands-on learning environment. Participants had the opportunity to work collaboratively, practice on roasters of different sizes, compare electric and gas roasting systems, and explore how batch size, equipment, time, temperature, airflow, and development decisions influence the final cup.
For many coffee professionals, this kind of direct, guided experience is rare. The opportunity to roast, taste, compare, ask questions, and work alongside other attendees created a rich learning environment for building both technical skill and sensory knowledge.
The event also created valuable opportunities for attendees to engage directly with the Diedrich team. Through hands-on interaction, maintenance conversations, and Q&A with experienced Diedrich technical support staff, participants were able to connect roasting education with the practical realities of equipment care, operational efficiency, upkeep, and extending the life of their roasting systems.
Diedrich was proud to serve as the event sponsor and host Roast Summit in our Chicago education facility. We are grateful to the Roast Magazine team for organizing such a seamless, professional, and collaborative event. Their planning, programming, and execution created an experience that was both highly educational and genuinely valuable for the roasting community.
Thank you to the presenters, sponsors, attendees, and everyone who helped make Roast Summit May 2026 a success. We were honored to support an event dedicated to advancing roasting education, technical knowledge, equipment care, and connection across the coffee industry.
