Our production roasts are roasted on a Coffee Per San Franciscan 25B. It is old, and we are not the first owners. That said, we do our best to make-up for it’s past cleaning and maintenance neglect. One such chore is cleaning all 24 burners, which are alined in 3 rows in sets of 8. Cleaning these can be a day long effort as we are forced to remove the company’s logo plate, unscrew and lift the drum siding, take out the insulation and finally remove one last plate between the insulation and the pilot- just to get to the burners. Once removed the burners are soaked first in water from our hot water tower, then a Simple Green bath (recommend to us by Coffee Per). A #58 welder’s tip cleaner is used to punch out any foreign matter that may be clogged in each dispersion aperture. Last the burners are scrubbed and rinsed several times with warm water, making sure all of the Simple Green has been washed away.

While this may seem rather laborious, I can’t stress enough how important this has proven. The overall temperature application is nearly twice as responsive allowing for much more precise adjustments at and after first crack. To top it off, our total gas needed to heat the drum, has also reduced by about 35%.

For those who don’t already know, we are one of three main beta testers for the newly developed platform/ software and storage program called Roastlog. Out of respect for the owners, I will not divulge too much information about Roastlog here, as it is set to be debuted in 10 days at this year’s SCAA Exposition in Anaheim, CA. I will however leave you with a screen shot of one of my roast curves (that last bit of up and down on the graph is me simply ramping up for the next roast- I forgot to turn the logger off).

Shark