Roasting of barley is currently an artisan process. As regulations and customer specifications become more precise, and experienced operators retire, a new approach to roast barley production is needed. To improve the quality of product greater understanding of the process is required. To enable automatic control methods to be implemented a model of the roasting process has been developed and tested on a spouted-bed roaster. The model uses parameters measured by other workers in fields such as grain drying and allows the change in temperature and moisture content of the barley to be predicted throughout the roasting period: a good fit between theory and experiment is obtained without recourse to any fitted parameters. This will enable changes in product characteristics to be modelled as a function of roasting control parameters such as temperature and time. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.