Coffee Tao

Seems we’ve figured out our flame issue–a dirty thermal coupling was causing the flame to go out at temperatures above 380 degrees. We’ve partially disassembled the burners, cleaned it, and realigned it. Our initial test run was promising, but I’m going to give it a real shot today.

Apologies if it seems like I’ve been quiet on the coffee front lately; we’re just putting our heads down and our nose to the grindstone trying to get to production status, and there’s a lot of niggling details to pay attention to. I keep reminding myself not to get impatient, because the truth is we’re ahead of schedule and under budget, but I still feel like we could have done this faster. Though it’s always easy to think that way with the benefit of hindsight, of course.

So close! Hopefully here in a couple of hours we’ll turn out our first true batch of coffee…

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Used the machine for its first roast today.  How’d it go, you ask?  Terribly, ha ha…turns out our gas pressure is too low, so the flame kept going out.  I tested it with a pound of Brazil Cerrado–almost got something manageable, but the third time the burners lost their flame, I couldn’t relight it for love or money.  The result was a baked bean that took nearly four full minutes between the first and second cracks.  Yeesh.

Well, we’ll fix the gas line tomorrow (I hope) and try again.  We’re almost there, just a few more bugs to work out.  It’s a busy time and we’re very excited, but equipment installation–especially when you’re doing it on your own–takes a lot of attention to detail, and a lot of trial and error.  We’ll get there.

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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.

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