Anne's Story
Anne Cooper has spent over 30 years in coffee — first behind the bar, then behind the roaster, and finally in front of the classroom at her very own roasting school, Equilibrium Master Roasters. Through it all, she has continually searched for a deeper understanding of the bean, her own senses, and the craft she has dedicated her life to sharing with others.
The Pivot to Roasting
Like many before and after her, she entered the coffee world as a barista. She then moved into training and management. After a decade in that world, she found a new spark in her life, stepping onto the competition stage and becoming Queensland Barista Champion from 2006 to 2008.
It was around this time that roasting crept in. It started the way a lot of coffee obsessions do — small, and a little makeshift. Anne began experimenting at home on a popcorn popper, moved to a Hottop, and before long was roasting full-time in production.
So she sought to level up her senses and in 2010, earned her Q Grader qualification — one she still holds today — before packing up for New York, where she remained till 2013. It was a formative stretch that leaned into all the strengths she had been building: she competed in the US Barista Championship, served on the SCAA Roasters Guild Executive Council and Education Committee, judged Brazil's very first Cup of Excellence for Naturals, and regularly taught at the annual Roasters Camp.
Coming Home
Anne returned to Australia in 2013 and landed in Melbourne as head roaster for Proud Mary. But she kept noticing the same thing: Australian roasters were still flying to the US just to attend the SCA Expo, because that's where all the serious workshops were.
In 2015, she decided to close that gap herself and founded Equilibrium Master Roasters. Eleven years later, and it's still training Australia's brightest young roasters — and Anne is now one of only four global Roastmasters recognized by Loring. Enter the Bullet
Anne got her Bullet in 2021, and it's become a core part of how she teaches — working with people at every stage of their roasting journey, from total beginners to production roasters refining their craft.
One of her favorite things to teach is profile transfer — moving a roast between different systems. She likes it because it works: anything roasted on the Bullet transfers easily onto a bigger machine, which makes it a genuinely useful pilot roaster for people waiting on their production equipment to arrive, or just testing before a bigger run.
Anne runs her Bullet a bit like a production machine herself — starting with the IBTS, then switching over to the bean probe once the roast is underway, which she finds more consistent and easier to repeat. She's happy for people to explore this firsthand: her Roast World account is open for anyone to browse and copy profiles from.
Keep It Simple First
If there's one thing Anne repeats to students often, it's this: don't touch everything at once. She encourages new Bullet users to leave the settings alone at first and only adjust power while they're still learning the machine. Air and drum come later — and only as tools, not defaults. In her experience, people get themselves into a bit of trouble when they change too much too soon, which is exactly why she teaches roasting as something structured and strategic rather than instinctive from day one.
Her favorite — and she believes most underrated — feature in the Bullet software is DT (Delta Temperature), which starts counting development degrees the moment first crack hits. Balanced against Development Time, it's what keeps a roast consistent, and it lines up perfectly with how she thinks about roasting more broadly.
Anne has also put together a full reference guide for anyone getting started on the Bullet, available in the articles section of the Equilibrium Master Roasters website.