During the last decade we have been quite busy "doing" rather than writing about our goals. Vancouver was the second Coffee & Tea Show in which the Roastaire™ was the only coffee roaster that was making magic in the hall. In time, we should blog some of the fundamentals that drive the project i.e. efficiency, pollution controls, sustainability, "greeness", freshness, design, roasting, etc.
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Function determined style for the roaster and the business model. FRESHNESS is our dominant theme. It, along with SUSTAINABILITY has determined the roaster design and the business model.
No one involved had the desire to operate a roasted coffee warehouse. For those who may not have given it much thought the green beans have a relatively long life span, just as other living seeds. Given proper storage conditions they last more than a year.
Roasted coffee has a short life span. This is incongruous with the designation of non perishable food. It has been written that lobbying by food purveyors resulted in a legislation that roasted coffee has a lifespan of greater than 18 months hence it was deemed non perishable. The coffee continues to stale along its own time line but the vendors do not have to indicate when it was roasted. Many gimmicks are used to give the impression that freshness is maintained or is not important. Valves do not "lock in freshness" they prevent the carbon dioxide, given off by the recently roasted beans, from bursting the bags. Cold storage does reduce chemical reactions but studies promoting this used temperatures that were much colder than the inside of a household deep freeze. Furthermore, bar the bath tub, the refrigerator is the most humid place in a house. It is not a good bean storage environment. Moving beans between the cold storage and the coffee preparation counter only exacerbates the problem. Grinding the beans at the time of purchase is most likely the worst practice. Store ground beans are probably better than going without but you deserve so much more.
The aim of getting the coffee to the consumer within 3 - 5 days has determined the size of the roaster and the business model. People have found that the optimum flavour is produced 24 to 48 hours after roasting. With this in mind www,FreshCup.ca opened an Online Store which ships coffee on roasting day via Expedited Parcel. There is no compromise possible on shipping - it has to be as fast as possible. To make the Expedited Parcel costs acceptable they are free within Canada for two lbs. of coffee, or more. To present the consumer with a top notch product all elements of the preparation have to attain the same high level. Giving someone the choice of saving a dollar with a snail like delivery was thought to be counter-productive.
It is getting quite obvious why this opinion was not a tweet.
The Roastaire™ has a 3 kg green bean capacity which yields nearly 6 lbs of roasted coffee depending on the degree of roast. The darker the roast the greater the weight losses. This roaster is able to do about 5 batches per hour, again depending on the degree of roast. This implies that a café only needs to roast what is required in the immediate future. The concept is "store green beans" and "move roasted coffee". Regarding the café owners; they will pay for a coffee roaster regardless, either it will be their own or that of a supplier.
Even though we have reason to believe that our roaster produces excellent coffee I think that you can be well served by a local roaster if your coffee is freshly roasted On-Site.
