Coffee Tao

So what’s going on with the roastery?

Glad you asked. After a week’s sprint of laying gas and electrical line, we worked out the kinks, hooked it up, flipped the switch, and we’ve got flame!:

If you’ve never worked in a roastery, let me tell you they take a long time to set up. There’s a seemingly endless litany of permits and construction involved before you ever roast your first batch, and it’s not unheard of for a new roastery to take a year and a half before it ever turns out its first bag of beans.

Fortunately for us, we started with some advantages. We already had a perfect space for the roaster, which didn’t require us to build a huge stack for the exhaust–we only needed four feet of ducting for it. We did need to run a 220V electrical line and extend our gas line to reach the machine, which leads into another advantage we have: my business partner Chris, who was capable of installing the ducting and utilities. He’s brand new to the roasting business but a clever mechanical engineer in his own right; he was recently profiled in the Seattle paper as a “resident mad scientist”, having recently installed an entire solar-powered electrical system to the existing coffeeshop. I know a lot about the science and techniques of roasting but I’m no proper engineer–heck, you should see the embarrassing way I tried to tie a pipe to the car roof when we bought one at the hardware store yesterday–so on my own, just getting power to the roaster would have cost a fortune. As it is, we’re actually under budget, and we’ve gotten set up in only two months or so which is screamingly fast, all things considered.

We still need to give the roaster a proper scrubbing, as the burners are firing dirty and the bean probe is a little laggy, but everything works and we’ll be turning out beans very soon. I’m incredibly excited. I’ve got some more pictures of our install under the cut.

Here we are lining up the ducting:

…and our new gas line extension. Pressure seems to be fine but we’re using a 1″ pipe instead of 3/4″ over a very long distance, so we’ll need to keep an eye on it. On the floor you can see the 220V plug box we were building as well:

The bean probe feels just a touch laggy but I was testing it on an uncharged drum which makes a difference. It was originally mounted on the right side of the machine–I’m going to move it to the other side so all my roasting variables will be within easy reach: