Looking Back Part 3 - Learning to Walk

Roasting coffee was fascinating and great fun but we felt a little limited in the facility we could rent roasting time in. The Probat UG22 was rather large with a minimum batch size of 10kg and there were close to no possibility to precisely monitor or influence any of the parameters to tweak the roast. Without a doubt the UG22 is one of the best roasters around and used by many renowned roasteries, but this example hadn't been technologically updated since it was installed seemingly a half-century ago.

So it quickly became quite clear that we needed our own roasting space with a smaller, more flexible and more modern roaster. At the time (this was 2010) there were not so many options for choosing a small-size roasting machine and old Probats were all being or already had been bought up by artisan roasters in the US, Canada and Australia. So our decision was to be made between the two best options on the market_ A Giesen or a Diedrich.

We chose the Diedrich IR12 for its versatility in changing roasting parameters and flexibility in batch size. Of course this was the pre-Cropster (the state-of-the-art data logging software) era but we could monitor what was going on inside the roaster and track the roast by hand!

Ducting and energy supply were ready in the summer of '11 and there was no stopping us from roasting more exciting coffees and roasting in lighter shades of brown. It was a steep learning curve with hardly any role models in our domestic market and the available knowledge resources just evolving.