When we first started this coffee roasting business we had some investment decisions to make... one of which was whether we purchased a destoner...
If you've been a reader of our weekly newsletter you'll know that I'm fascinated by coffee processing. You're likely aware that the coffee beans sitting in your grinder hopper are the roasted seeds of coffee cherries. In order to remove the pulpy fruit fresh of the cherries to get to the seeds, growers need to process the coffee cherry (and there are a heap of interesting ways to do this... many of which wildly impact the flavour of the coffee in your cup)...
Some coffee processing methods have the coffee cherries on the ground at some stage in the cycle and it's at this point where various non-coffee items can be introduced into the chain... things like stones and manufactured items like metal screws and nails. This is where a destoner becomes a critical part of the roastery production line. A destoner is basically a big cold air hairdryer which highlights the density difference between roasted beans (relatively low density) and stones and metal items (relatively high density) and allows the roastery to separate out these items.
For a small roastery like ours it was impossible to find an appropriately sized destoner, and so we ended up purchasing ours from Minnesota, USA! We added the option of a rare earth magnetic bar to ensure that metallic items are caught.
Every time we roast and destone we're thankful that we made this expensive decision early. One of our recent roasts yielded SEVEN stones, which, thankfully, didn't make their way to your grinder potentially damaging your grinder burrs!
So getting back to the title of this blog post... we at Garage Roasters love post-purchase confirmation and the photo associated with this post is that confirmation.
Have a great weekend.
To read about Yemeni coffee click here
To read about Ethiopia click here