Journey to Roasting, pt. 2: Installs and Stalled Jobs

In this series, we share the how Coffee Hour Co. went from an idea to a reality, and the lessons we've learned along the way.

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We were elated to receive a call one day last April from the delivery man dropping off our fluid bed roaster. We drove to the shop and watched him unload an impressive package, which we then had to open outside in order to carry in piece by piece.

Getting the roaster inside was only the first obstacle. What followed was a series of minor, and major, roadblocks before we would be able to roast. All in all, it wasn’t terrible looking back; but in the moment, when we were eager to get going, each obstacle felt a little harder to overcome. 

First, we needed some electrical work done to have sufficient voltage for our Valenta roaster. That was simple enough. Jacob did a bit of wiring himself, which resulted in a bit of a shock... actually. The electrician accomplished the rest of the required setup.

The first night we went to the shop to roast, we finally had everything in order. Or so we thought; as soon as we went to plug the laptop into the Hermetheus co-pilot, we realized we didn’t have a compatible port in our laptop for the plug. Off to walmart! When we got back, we went to download the software, only to find the drive containing the download was... blank. What are the odds? We went home feeling pretty defeated.

When we returned the following night, Hermetheus download intact (their team was very fast to respond), we eagerly began our first roast. We roasted our first dozen or so batches using some poor-quality green beans I ordered on Amazon. 

Now, I’m going to get really honest here. An important step had been neglected prior to our first roast, which was the installation of a ventilation hood. Okay okay, laugh all you want! But somehow, I’m still able to justify why in our heads we reasoned it probably wasn’t necessary.

The space we were roasting in has terrifically high ceilings, for one thing. For another, as we understood the roasting process, all that would be pushed out through the hood was hot air. Why would that need to be vented through the roof, so long as it didn’t make the room too hot?

Well, I’ll tell you why. The ventilation hood expels not only hot air, but micro chaff not caught in the chaff collection bag. Besides, it isn't just pure, untainted hot air; it's air used to roast beans. It's air that smells like burnt popcorn.

Chaff is the flaky skin of the coffee bean that appears after the moisture has dropped and the bean has begun to roast. As mentioned, there is a chaff collection bag which does its job, but even then, there are little particles of what might as well be burnt dust being blown out the hood – and with no ventilation out the roof, this means blown into your roasting space.

All that to say, yes. We set off the fire alarm that night.

No, no fire, just hot, smelly air with chaff billowing throughout the room, covering our surfaces and stinking up the place. By the time we noticed the air and smell around us changing, it was too late. 

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!!!

We frantically positioned the ladder for Jacob to ascend to the loft floor and beat the unit into silence, and I dropped the batch and shut down the machine. We were only 4 minutes into our 9 minute roast.

Deflating defeat, once again!

Of course, this time it really was our own silly fault.

It took us a week or so to track down a contractor that would be good for the job, and then another two and a half weeks before that job was finished. We had unwittingly set ourselves back three weeks by not adequately understanding the roast process or our machine. 

But when we finally returned to roast, it was a great success. Oh, that’s not to say the coffee tasted good. It was horrific (combination of bad beans and bad roast). But we were roasting, and things were working, and we had crossed a milestone in our journey.

In the next post, I'll share about our early roasting experience: the good, the bad, the terrible, and eventually, the delicious.