Category — Personal

Our roasting machine arrived crated on a pallet today–I’m very excited. I took the crating apart, moved it off the pallet, cleaned the machine, and put it back together. We still need to hook it up to the afterburner and the gas line, but this was probably the most fun part.

Here’s the crated machine, just off the truck (you can see our afterburner in the background):

Here I’ve started breaking down the crate, and you can see the machine’s nameplate. Normally the nameplate on San Franciscans is brass, but for some reason a previous owner decided to paint the plate and all the fittings a uniform black. I don’t mind, though I’d prefer the original brass:

See more pictures, including the fully assembled machine, after the cut.

[Read more →]

We went to pick up the afterburner the other day and brought it over Snoqualmie Pass in a friend’s truck. We also palletized the roasting machine itself, and it might get here as soon as this afternoon. I hope so; we’ve got a ton of work ahead of us but I’m looking forward to all of it.

While the machine was being crated , we learned some interesting lore about it: it turns out that this San Franciscan was Cafe Vita’s first roasting machine, as well as being the same machine that launched Caffe Fiore and Pioneer Coffee Company. (Pioneer is who we, in turn, purchased it from.)

So this 12k San Franciscan has launched three successful Seattle coffee roasteries…let’s hope it can launch a fourth, eh?

We finally found a proper roasting machine, a San Franciscan SF-25B. It’s in about a hundred pieces but it’s in solid shape and the price was right. We’ll palletize it and bring it over Snoqualmie Pass as soon as the snow lets us.

It’s an older machine, mostly manual the way I like it, with an aftermarket digital temp probe which will help with roast profiling. I need to clean it inside and out, install the new cooling fan motor that came with it, and then put it back together and hook it up to our ducting and gas line. Also, it’s painted black-on-black and we may strip the fittings and nameplate back to the original brass. A lot of work involved but it’s worth it for the right machine.

Here’s the “before” picture, showing the machine as we saw it in many pieces sitting in the back of a warehouse… (Forgive the poor image quality, I was using my iPhone camera in a darkened room.)