New beginnings...

... and I'd only just started.

That first fluid-bed roaster was a great intro to roasting. But it was noisey! The beans crashed around inside the roasting chamber and made a terrible racket. That bean noise masked the sounds the roasting beans make that the person roasting needs to hear to track roast progress.

After a few months I learned a guy named Ron Kyle (he started RK Drums) was finding homes for his first prototype lot of coffee roasting drums. Those first few were something like $80, but I missed that by a few days and got one from the first production lot for $120 (#105 as I recall). I had to supply a propane BBQ and a motorized spit. But we were into freezing weather so I dragged my feet after ordering the drum.

Before I could roast the first batch of greens, Ron sent me a note and asked if I was interested in an industrial spit drive motor since most BBQ spit motors weren't up to the job for 4-5 lbs of green beans and they ran at the wrong speed (too slow). I said yes and by the time the substitute spit motor arrived (he had to make it in his shop), the ice was starting to melt and I had the whole setup ready.

The BBQ came from Home Depot- one of the CharBroil models (Ron had told me which ones would work). I had to remove the grill to make way for the drum and I had to drill a couple holes to mount the new spit motor (similar to that in the photo). At that time Home Depot was selling BBQ briquettes made from what looked like cast furnace cement (I think that's changed to ceramic these days). I bought enough to line the bottom 'tray' (directly below where the grill would have been and above the flame). The idea was for the briquettes to serve as a thermal mass to stabilize the heat from the burner. In hindsight I'm not sure it was a good idea because it introduced a huge thermal lag if I wanted to change the heat, but that's what I did. Perhaps it was a recommendation from Ron but he had a photo on his site that included the thermal briquettes.

At this point I knew roasting beans involved something called first crack & second crack. And that's basically what I did for every roast regardless what beans I was roasting. It would be a couple more years before I understood that I was supposed to vary the thermal process depending on the bean variety. So if I got something good out of the roast it was only because I happened to buy beans that were appropriate for what was a very dark roast.

Instrumentation amounted to the temperature indicator in the lid of the roaster. Ron told us all to get that temp to at least 350°F before starting a roast and that's what I did. Then I waited to hear first crack and then second crack. At second crack the drum came out and I dumped the now-roasted beans into a giant sieve resting on a 5-gal bucket and was plumbed to the exhaust of a small ShopVac.

There was a problem in paradise, however. By the time I got the door of the drum open, things were headed past second crack. So I started using a spray bottle filled with water to mist the drum immediately after it came off the heat. That little innovation actually helped a lot, even though purists will be quick to point out that getting roasted beans wet is the kiss of death. Actually the beans were so hot the water vaporized instantly and the bean temperature dropped like a stone.

The water mist idea wasn't mine. A process engineer named Michael Sivetz (d. 2012) who designed and manufactured commercial fluid bed roasters (left). He routinely incorporates water cooling as the last step in his system design. I exchanged one e-Mail with him about water cooling and to paraphrase his response 'it's all in how you use the water and for how long'. I have no idea if I was meeting any of his criteria, but the only reason I tried it was because Sivetz used it in his design and what I did worked well.

How long were the roasts? Haven't a clue! Didn't know if batch #1 was as long as batch #2 either (they probably weren't). I didn't write down anything as I was scrambling to keep track of what little I knew to do without getting frostbite. It would take a couple years before I accepted that record keeping is part of roasting! So...

When an internet acquaintance steered me to Coffee Roasting Database, that started the next phase. I learned to keep minimal notes about time since the BBQ had no instrumentation to measure heat. But I limped along for many years.

Then in 2009 we discovered RVs.