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Becoming one with your roast through engaging your senses.
Us roasters do not often consider the sensory pleasures when coffee roasting.
This is primarily due to the “closed” design of most traditional roasting systems, resulting in the coffee roaster being disengaged from their beans, throughout the roast.
You may be wondering what we mean by “closed”. Most coffee roasting systems have Closed Roast Chambers, restricting the interaction between the coffee roaster and their coffee beans, from green beans to freshly roasted, golden-brown beans.
Let's be frank, a coffee roaster who decides to pursue coffee roasting as a career, does not only do it for the money, they also do it for their love of coffee and their love of roasting the best coffee beans, which is an art in its own right.
That said, we don’t believe that there is another roaster out there that can compare with the live interaction one gets with an Air-Motion Roaster and especially with one’s coffee beans during the roasting process.
A seasoned drum roaster, who also roasts on other fluid-bed type roasters, explained:
“After roasting on the Air-Motion Roaster for the first time, compared to roasting on other roasting technologies, I feel that with other roasters I can only plot the roast going forward and can only expect to see the results of my efforts once I dump the beans into the cooling tray after the roast has been completed."
"Further to this, should I want to change the course of the roast during the roast process I have no immediate response feature that I can rely on and always have to think ten steps ahead”.
He then described his experience with roasting on the Air-Motion Roaster as:
“It’s like having A Front Row Seat, one that is interactive with the roast process in real time, with full control, not only with where I am going, but also with the ability to change course and manipulate the roast at any point in time I want, with an immediate response”.
It all starts with what we refer to as “OCR” or “Open Chamber Roasting”. This is where the beans are visible within the Open Roast Chamber. The Roast Chamber sits vertically, and the beans are Dropped into it from the top.
There is a gap between the Roast Chamber and the Extraction Hood providing a full visual into the Roast Chamber putting you in-touch with the step-by-step journey of the coffee beans from green to perfectly roasted.
Although on other roasters it is boasted that one can monitor the roast in real time, via graphs and number tracking on a screen. The Air-Motion Roaster has the same functionality, however, with the “OCR” and the addition of boosting your senses of sight, smell and sound also comes into play.
Sense of Sight:
The first sense one experiences is visual, seeing the first bit of Chaff coming off the beans as heat is applied to them making them expand, loosening the Chaff from the bean and then watching the Chaff being removed from the Roast Chamber by the extraction system, the roasting process has now started.
Sense of Smell:
As this happens the moisture starts being extracted from the beans, which actually can be seen as well, giving off the aromas of bread dough or yeast, highly evident to one’s sense of smell. This process continues and the beans start turning yellow in colour, again turning back to visual as the roast enters the Yellowing or Drying Phase. We then move from this phase into the Maillard Reaction phase where the aroma changes to one of sweet pancakes and waffles being toasted, again igniting one’s sense of smell. The sugars are activated and the colour of the beans start changing from caramel to tan, light brown, brown, to dark brown, again back to the visual sense.
Sense of Sound:
The heat has now reached the centre of the bean, and this is where the First Crack can be heard by the beans expanding rapidly making a popping noise like popping popcorn, the sense of hearing or sound. The beans then continue to change in colour until the correct profile is chosen and beautiful aromas of toasted coffee now fill the senses.
It is this experience of using all of your senses, a touchscreen interface displaying crucial information in real time, together with a system of immediate control during the roast that sets the Air-Motion Roaster apart.
For us, there is nothing more satisfying than becoming one with our beans, nurturing them every step of the way throughout the whole process and bringing them home to that perfect roast, with the best seat in the house and not missing a beat during the roast, it is a true Artisanal experience.
“With an Air-Motion Roaster, offering you “A Front Row Seat”, you can now become one with your coffee beans, which makes them uniquely, become one with you”… JP.
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