Why do you roast with a smaller air roaster?

One of the biggest questions we get asked when we're at a live event is why we chose an air roaster if it's smaller. It's a good question and there are a few reasons for it.

The first is because we started our coffee roasting journey as home roasters using an air popcorn popper. That might seem like a strange reason until you understand that our current roaster is just a larger, more capable version of the same technology. Both are what are known as fluid bed roasters. They heat air via electricity and then blow that air up through the bottom of the bed of coffee beans. So making the leap from home roaster to professional roaster was much easier since we were already proficient with this kind of roasting.

Secondly, this type of roaster gives us a significant amount of control over each roast. We can track the temperature of the air passing through the coffee bed in one second increments (as opposed to 15-30 second increments). This allows us to carefully follow the roast profile for the coffee we are currently roasting. Also, because it is an all electric roaster there is no chance that any combustion byproducts can accidently contaminate the beans as they are roasting which helps us maintain a high standard of quality.

Thirdly, this type of roaster is takes up less space and weighs significantly less than the more typical drum roaster. As we have converted a our house this was of paramount importance. Bags of green coffee already weigh a lot so avoiding placing more weight on our floor joists was a huge plus.

Lastly, this kind of roaster was significantly cheaper than a more traditional drum roaster. If we had purchased a drum roaster with the same budget we would have ended up with a unit too small to be useful at launch, let alone as we grew. 

All in all our current roaster has been a work horse and we still have room to grow before we have to add a second roaster. Yes, the batches are small but thanks to the technology we are able to keep our quality up while offering the best tasting coffee we possibly can.