New roaster in the building

New roaster in the building

Garage Roasters recently purchased a small sample/profile roaster...

Happy 2025, I hope you enjoyed a great New Year's Eve!

I've been wanting to take our roasting to the next level... and to do that we had to purchase a smaller rather than larger roaster.

We chose to purchase an Aillio Bullet roaster as our sample/profile roaster.  Sample roasting is the process whereby green coffee importers and roasters determine whether there are faults in a particular coffee, there's a standard protocol involved with both the roasting as well as the cupping of the coffee.  Profile roasting is different, it attempts to mimic the full roasting profile so that key dimensions of the roast (time at different stages, rate of temperature rise, ending temperature of the roast) can be altered in order to work out the very best roasting profile.

The Aillio Bullet is a very interesting machine with two distinct sources of differentiation:

  1. The way that it measures temperature; and
  2. The way that it heats beans.

Coffee roasters all have a charge weight (that is the weight of green beans that you add to the drum for roasting) sweet spot.  As a general rule of thumb the sweet spot lies at around 80-90% of stated capacity, so our 5 kg machine would have a sweet spot somewhere between 4.0 - 4.5 kg of green beans.  Importantly there is a minimum charge weight which can be usefully roasted.  Minimum charge is really dependent on the accuracy of the systems used for measuring the roast, in particular the ability for temperature to be measured correctly.  The smaller the charge the more the thermocouples in a typical roaster measure air temperature rather than bean temperature.  The Aillio Bullet has two methods by which temperature are measured.  The first is the traditional thermocouple set up.  The second is a truly innovative measure of the infrared signature of the beans tumbling around the roasting drum.  The Aillio Bullet has a stated capacity of 1 kg and, after about 30 research roasts calibrated using our DiFluid roast colour analyser, I've worked out that the machine reliably measures and roasts charges down to 150 g.  I think that the infrared sensor is a game changer!

The other major innovation which the Bullet incorporates is the way that the drum is heated.  Commercial coffee roasters are generally heated by gas burners.  Small domestic roasters tend to use electric heating elements.  The Bullet uses induction to heat the drum.  This means that the Bullet is both highly responsive to user changes in heat settings and is also very efficient in terms of energy usage.

I've been delighted with this addition to the roastery and I fully expect that you'll see Garage Roasters scale new heights in roasting excellence as a result.

To hear about a milk steaming survey click here

To learn about the results of our milk steaming survey click here

To hear about roasting points of failure click here

Purchase Garage Roasters coffee here

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