Show notes
To roast coffee faster, you need to turn up the heat….right?
No!
In this episode, we explore the three powerful methods of heat transfer that revolutionised roasting. We’ll journey from humble beginnings—when roasting three kilos took half an hour—to machines that now roast hundreds of kilos of coffee in the time it takes you to boil a kettle.
But beans roasted at lightning speed look strange, and taste… well, you’ll find out. Join us as we test-drive an industrial tangential roaster where first crack remind me of fireworks crackers.
We also see the whale-sized roaster so massive it’s worth you a Guinness World Record.
We have the technology today to roast coffee faster than ever, so why aren’t we all roasting at recording-breaking speeds?
Check out the Probat roasters mentioned in this episode:
Emmerich Spherical Roaster - "Pink Hydrant"
Large ball roaster - “Sputnik in a pizza oven”
G45 early drum roaster - “Old school steam train”
Sample tangential roaster - "Shoebox"
Neptune 4000, the largest drum roaster in the world! - "The whale"
And there are lots of other specialty roasters from Probat I didn't have time to showcase, including their new hydrogen powered roasters. See them all for yourself!.
Theodor von Gimborn's wikipedia page
Go deeper into the science of roasting
Read Mark Al-Shemmeri’s coffee roasting blog
Do a Certificate of Advanced Studies with the Coffee Excellence Centre
Explore Barista Hustle's online roasting learning
Learn more from Morten Münchow and his coffee roasting courses
Read Morten’s paper in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen on Roasting Conditions and Coffee Flavour
Learn more about first crack on my episode Coffee Roasting, Part 1: How heat transforms coffee beans
Season 3 is made possible by these leading coffee organizations:
The Coffee Quest | BWT | TODDY | Algrano | Probat
Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts or your favourite app.
More from The Science of Coffee
See allThe hard business of selling beautiful coffee
Volume. Cheap. Lame flavours. This is the traditional way of growing coffee in Brazil, and almost every farm does it this way.
The chemistry of coffee roasting
A mother coffee plant gifts its baby everything it needs to grow—a green seed packed with food. But when we roast coffee, we hijack that gift and turn it into something else: flavor.
Fruit juice or creamy almonds? Your guide to controlling cold brew flavors
When I started making cold brew this last year, I treated it like hot brew filter coffee. But no matter how I adjusted the grind or tweaked the brew time, I hardly got any differences in…
