About wood roasting

We roast using a vintage Italian Petroncini fired with local hardwood. It looks like most well-constructed industrial quality roasters, but instead of a series of gas jets there is a firebox beneath our brick-lined steel drum.

On roast days we start a fire with matches and kindling, just like you would in a woodstove or a fire pit. Once it’s up to temperature, it operates by both conduction (the hot drum wall “toasting” the coffee) and convection (the hot air from the wood fire passing through the bean mass). It’s this latter exchange of heat, and the high rate of airflow that our wood fire requires, that makes our process a little different.

Please note that roasting coffee with wood is not like smoking a pork shoulder. While the latter uses very low heat, takes all day and saturates the barbecue with particulate, roasting coffee takes 13 minutes, give or take, and the fire is hot and clean. Our process is traditional, intuitive, and completely manual–there’s no way to automate the burning of wood–but we track our roasts with multiple thermocouples and a computer, and attempt to replicate our best tasting roast profiles to the second and degree.
 

Ultimately, though, our coffee tastes good not merely because of our unique roaster, but because of the coffee itself and the work of the people who grow and harvest it. We purchase exceptional coffee at prices far above the fair trade minimum and attempt to roast it in a way that highlights its inherent attributes. As a wise coffee person told me almost a decade ago, when I was just starting to get my business together, “It’s all in there. Your job is to keep from screwing it up.”

There’s a lot of good coffee out there. Thanks for giving ours a try.

Cheers,

Matt