Holy crap. I did 2100 miles or so in 36 hours to Albuquerque, NM over the 4th weekend. Picked up the Torrefattore roaster. Met the seller at a microbrewery buried in the back of an industrial park for the delivery. a 5 piece band playing some kind of new age music. Great beer. Great people hanging out with their kids. the brew/make root beer too. ... joined the seller and a group 10 of his friends and hung out and told stories. Very nice people, and a good mix. Preppies, over the hill hippies, blue collars. My seller is like the illustrated man - beaucoup tattoos. Good people. The beer hit me hard after that marathon drive through the desert. Anyway, after we all repaired to a chinese buffet for dinner, I turned down offers of a bedroom from several of them and started the drive back. I got 54 miles out of town and my body essentially shut down. I always listen when this happens, so I found the closest rest area and proceeded to pass out for 6 hours. Not from the beer, I might add. Woke up at sunrise and started south to Las Cruces. The desert of NM is really amazing. Craggy mountains. Lakes in the middle of nowhere butted up against those mountains. Sand dunes. You name it. I suggest it highly. and Roswell is a trip, by the way. I hit it in the afternoon on the way over. Everyone was dressed up as aliens ... this area is famous for their reputed Starman encounters ... and they are really yucking it up. I shoulda stopped to get a hat or a t-shirt or something. All in all, a really nice trip.
The roaster is beautiful. And totally intimidating. Especially after reading a posting by Bold Java about his profile for the Kona Earth offering. BJ is Mozart, and I am an idiot with a Stradivarious, or however it is spelled. After having trained on a Behmor, where my only challenge was deciding between P1 and P2 and how I was going to jigger the system to give me more time before it shut me down, I am going to have to learn the physics of roasting from scratch with this thing. It does not have accurate temperature readouts for the bean mass, and no matter what Milo says - it produces some serious heat that gets stored up in the steel of the unit - this thing weighs 150 pounds I would guess. I have no idea how I am going to run this thing ...
A client came over yesterday for a meeting and he wanted to help out. He is an industrial engineer who now runs a beach umbrella and chair concession on south padre island. We wired up the 220 - and we got a nice red tool cart from Harbor Freight for the roaster. We roasted two one pound loads. I was afraid to try the max of 1 kilo as I hate wasting beans. I did not use the fan to moderate temp. I just dumped the beans in at 150 centigrade and let her run. I did a pound of Burundi that was 2 years old, and a pound of Guat Huehuetenango. First crack was at 8 minutes and before I knew it I was way past second crack at 11 and 12 minutes for the two batches. The beans were not burned. They were uniformly roasted - and the cyclone chaff collector did a good job making the roasts clean. I am going to have to pay attention and I am going to have to try to get educated. Especially with the fresher Guats, it was amazing to see the steam pouring out of the exhaust even after 3 minutes. I had a freaking choochoo train - thought is was smoke until I stuck my nose over the pipe.
The engineer was really impressed with the construction. Said the unit was really well-manufactured and that the components are what they use in high tech nc equipment. For example, the motor running the drum is mounted vertically in the back and uses a really nice 90 degree transfer case to turn the shaft connected to the drum. It runs quietly and the drum is turning at something like twice the speed of the Behmor's drum. If these things come up for auction, and the price is right - I would say go for it. You have a machine that makes chingos of heat, lots of metal that stores that heat, a well made solid machine that looks like it will survive a nuclear attack, and a fan that blows like a wind tunnel. All very manual. So if you know what you are doing, it seems that you can make really good coffee.
This post is not very helpful to anyone. But since I am probably the only person who will be reading an old thread, I am just recording a few thoughts that I will supplement as I try to graduate into a very select club.
