Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News, Roaster News
Drum Roasters vs Fluid Bed
Most people don’t know that I started out my coffee roaster career building fluid bed roasters of various sizes including one that recirculated heat. Despite my best efforts all were failures and I never achieved the professional roast quality I was interested in. In hindsight, I’d estimate that exactly half of my failure was directly… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News, Designing for Coffee, Start, Scale, Sustain
Hello, new capability…
Many of you know that we do a big chunk of our engineering here in Minneapolis. Over the years, we have grown to be the most skilled, most professional, most experienced, and most capable manufacturer in this industry. We know how to build machines that reliably make money and we know exactly how to keep… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News, Roaster News
New Roaster Color (Experiment?)
As a design aesthetic, our roasters have always been a bit more Bauhaus where form very closely follows function. They are classically abstract, angular, and geometric, with little ornamentation. I choose this new color scheme mostly because, after thousands of utilitarian black bodied roasters, I simply wanted to experiment with a new set of contrasting… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News
Cheap Chinese Steel & Other Myths
A funny thing happened on the way to our becoming the best selling roaster manufacturer in US history. Suddenly we’re accused of building with “cheap chinese steel.” After spending close to 40 years manufacturing stuff for a living, this is the dumbest sh-t I’ve ever heard. Like the 6000+ people earning a living with our… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News
Commercial Coffee Roasters: Used, Refurbished, & Trade-Ins.
Most of you know that, beyond the occasional swapped out demo machine, we do not normally deal in used or refurbished coffee roasters. Our machines are proven to hold their value. For us however, reselling used coffee roasting machines sight unseen and then arranging local crating and transportation require steeply discounted prices to cover these… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News
Mill City Roasters Vs. Bellwether
Back To The Future If you are reading this, you probably like coffee. A lot. We love coffee. We love the process. We love the artistry. We love the craft. Most of all, we love the customers we serve and the co-workers we serve with that make our coffee community special. The only thing that’s… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News
Coffee-Tech Solar vs MCR-2D?
I received an email this morning asking about how the Coffee-Tech Solar compares to the MCR-2D. If you are wondering the same thing, this is my response…“I have narrowed down our first 2G roaster choices to your Mill City Roasters 2kg with digital control and the Coffee-Tech Engineering Solar Eco. I’m hoping you can help… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News
Heat Transfer Failures
This was a not atypical internet forum post this morning: Looking for feedback from other profile roasters. How many times during a roast are you reducing your gas pressure/flame height? Do you find if you reduce too frequently, the woody matrix of the bean (aka cellulose) is thermally degraded in a way that reduces… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News, Roaster News, Roasting & Education, Start, Scale, Sustain
How Does Toll Roasting Work?
Mill City Roasters’ Production Facility In addition to selling roasters and hosting classes at our headquarters in Minneapolis, we also operate a full-scale production roastery. In that roastery, you’ll find four production-sized roasters, packaging equipment, industrial grinders, and green coffee storage. We are able to roast, pack, and ship over 5,000 lbs of coffee each… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Roaster News
Why does the weigh/fill machine need compressed air?
I received a very good question from a prospective weigh/fill customer today about why our weigh/fill machine needs an air connection and others do not. This was my response: Strictly speaking, an air connection is not mandatory. If you have one though, you’ll fill bags about 30% faster. Roasting coffee isn’t necessarily all about speed,… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Roaster News, Start, Scale, Sustain
The “Perfect” Roaster?
A funny thing happened the other day on Facebook Coffee Roasters Forum. Another numbskull posted that his company was engaged in the exercise of building the “perfect” roaster and asked people to chime in about what they thought their “dream roaster” would look like. I have several problems with this entire exercise. First, if your commercial… Read More
Brew with Us, Coffee Roastery Equipment, Roaster News, Roasting & Education
Flash Brew Iced Coffee
What is flash brew? Flash iced brew coffee is simple. Take the full amount of water you would use in a hot brew and split it in half, replace half of that water by weight with ice. Then, extract over the ice. This melts the ice and rapidly dilutes the coffee, without that dilution the… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment
Mill City Digital vs Manually Controlled Roasters?
All Mill City Roasters have double walled drums, monolithic welded chassis, variable fan and drum speed, dedicated cooling fans, and integrated data logging. Drum pressure is a feedback loop for fan speed. Drum speed control allows an operator to tune the machine for better performance across a broad range of batch sizes. Our manually controlled… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Roaster News
Best Commercial Coffee Roaster: the myth of the “perfect” roaster.
I’ve been hanging around commercial coffee for awhile and I don’t normally search the internet for the “best commercial coffee roaster”. Recently though. I’ve been inundated with spam and internet ads and breathless paid placement new product release articles and a proliferation of weaponized click bait sites. I can only imagine that the marketing departments… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News, Roaster News, Start, Scale, Sustain
BTU per pound? Scaling from a small to a large production coffee roaster?
I received an email from a customer this morning with a good question about BTUs: “I am seeking a roaster that can do somewhere in the range of 20-25 pound batches at 12 or so minutes. we are on an 8 pound roaster now and we can get 8pounds to FC at between 8-9min… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment
“Why is there a cover over the cooling tray?”
That’s a good question. We incorporate cooling tray covers because our cooling trays are very much higher performance than industry standard. They are designed to cool a full batch of coffee from second crack within 4 minutes and they are designed to accommodate 3 full batch sizes for blending roasted coffee. That means we use… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment
MCR 30kg vs Diedrich DR25 coffee roaster?
I received an email today from a customer asking how our MCR 30kg compares to Diedrich DR25. Although I have a great deal of familiarity with the Diedrich’s IR and CR series roasters, I was unfamiliar enough with the DR model that I was forced to review Diedrich’s website and study the specs. This is… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Commercial Coffee Roaster News, Roaster News, Start, Scale, Sustain
Coffee Roasting: What matters the most?
There is a lot of well meaning “advice” about coffee roasting online, but it’s seldom weighted in terms of the relative impact it makes on your coffee and your craft. We talk to owners about their coffee quality every day. This is a list of the 10 things I find myself talking about the most.… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment
RoastPATH : Roast Precision Reinvented.
We’ve spent thousands of hours engineering 12 various sized roasting machines uniquely built to answer the demands of modern specialty coffee production. The result is that Mill City Roasters now produces the most powerful, heaviest built, most controllable, and most uniquely instrumented commercial coffee roasters in the broadest range of sizes ever built. While better… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Roaster News, Start, Scale, Sustain
Why Coffee Shops Should Roast In-House
Why should you roast your own coffee? Coffee consumers everywhere are demanding more and better coffee. Although the coffee business has become more competitive, in many markets quality coffee can still be surprisingly hard to find. Coffee is a story and one of the greatest benefits to roasting coffee in-house is simply to take charge… Read More