Coffee Roastery Equipment, Roaster News
Commercial coffee roasters: used, refurbished, and 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, 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
Coffee Roastery Equipment
What the heck is RoastPATH?
In the pursuit of better coffee, Mill City Roasters was the first manufacturer to embrace datalogging as a “standard” feature on all of our models. For years, Mill City Roasters pioneered and championed the use of Artisan and Cropster for several years even going so far as to contribute to the Artisan build library and provided Phidget… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment
Is Mill City Roasters a Chinese brand?
Comment from What’s the Best Coffee Roaster? on Youtube: holly1 day ago Thanks for your input, it is still an opinon from a chinese brand whose competitive advantage was price. But you got a few points clear, there’s market paranoia and some brands are cutting corners somewhere and pressing with bulls** arguments. I’m shure this… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Roasting & Education
Mill City Picks: Home Brewing Equipment
Following an upward trend over the past several years, many specialty coffee customers are enjoying their favorite beverage in a new locale: their homes. Home brewing is on the rise, and equipment manufacturers are rising to meet the occasion. There’s something for everyone in the home brewing market, from beautiful single cup pour over cones,… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment
Mill City Picks: Cafe Equipment
Our founder, Steve Green, tends to refer to Mill City Roasters as a small business incubator. What he means by that is we’re a place where people start. We help them with equipment, training and education, and all the little questions they have along the way. Our instructors teach students to roast, which is fitting… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment, Designing for Coffee
Mill City earns CSA Design Certification – an industry first.
Mill City Roasters recently earned the world’s first CSA Design Certification for coffee roasters. We’ve outlined below what this certification is, how it is beneficial to our Mill City customers and what comes next. About CSA: The Canadian Standards Association, or CSA, is a ‘Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory’, (abbreviated as NRTL and commonly referred to… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment
Introducing MATTE finish for the MCR Series coffee roasters, new for 2020
We excited to launch a new finish option in our upcoming MCR Series roasters – Matte! This new matte finish offers a more refined look on all the stainless steel of your roaster. For a limited time, matte finish is available at no extra charge. Check out the photos below of a new 10kg Gas… Read More
Coffee Roastery Equipment
How do our large roasters compare?
Ridiculous. Our machines are constructed as solid plate steel weldments. They are heavier and quieter than almost everything on the market, and just happen to be robust and powerful enough to profile roast full batch sizes for as long as you care to stand there. The only people talking about continuous use or vibration problems… Read More