Roasting Coffee Machines: What’s behind Them?

Coffee roasting machines fall into two basic types: drum or hot-air. Drum consists of horizontal rotating drums that bowl down green coffee beans in a heated environment. 

It’s hard to believe one bean has so much value that it created a whole industry around it. Coffee beans follow complex procedures that end in a cup that customers worldwide enjoy every day. After the beans are carefully extracted and sorted, comes the roasting. This is the part where the roasting machines are in charge, but how? Find out what’s behind them here.

Roasting back in the mid to late 1800s was carried out by an old procedure that required an enclosed skillet. Children usually did the job, and it consisted of holding the skillet over the fire while rotating the beans within.

After the first laws of coffee purity had been implemented, home production evolved into a new factory roasting. The first industrial roasters were just large cylinders that were put to heat. While this allowed more coffee to be roasted, the emptying and cooling were a complication.

It was in 1864 that Jabez Burns invented the self-emptying coffee roaster in New York. This machine had an opening mechanism that emptied the beans without the need to remove the cylinder from the flame and a double screw that allowed an easier distribution of the beans.

Manufacturers began innovating in the early 1880’s by adding hot air to the equation: German manufacturer Van Gulpen introduced a roaster with holed walls that allowed the machine to draw the hot air inside the drum or through the drum from one end to the other. This manufacturer also added a fan that would provide fresh air to the beans in the roasting process. After this, coffee roasters changed from closed cylinders to vented, open air machines.

Carl Salomon of Braunschweig introduced an original principle to the process: hot gas ventilation for a quicker roasting. By determining the number of revolutions required to tumble the beans off the wall into the hot air stream, he managed to get a faster (the roasting time fell to 20 minutes approximately) and more effective roast.

Cylinder roasters today use more advanced variations of this design, so it might be said that Carl Salomon set the basis for one of the most popular ways of roasting. Today, roasters employ one of the two methods: the one that involves using heat under the drum and then sucked through holes; and the second, using hot air blown into the drum.

That Coffee Roasters are professionals in the roasting process, hence their name. They’ve been in this business for long, and their products are examples of excellence. They even use a Jabez Burns & Sons Sample Coffee Roaster (which is in the image below) to ensure the quality of the beans they roast in a larger scale. Discover a coffee profile of high standards, contact them now!

The 1929 R6 Jabez Burns & Sons Roaster is a classic sample roaster machine that's still used today.

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That Coffee Roasters

Phone Number: (305) 821-8811

2697 W. 76 Street, Hialeah, Florida 33016

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