What’s In A Roastery?

This is the first in an ongoing series on what tools we keep in the Mill City Roastery for efficiency, quality control, and more. 

What do you need in your roastery?

We help customers build their roasting business from the ground up. From choosing the right size roaster, and offering roasting classes, to providing ongoing technical support and roasting advice. We hope to help our customers grow their brands and be successful. Many of our customers find themselves operating a commercial facility for the first time. They may have questions about which tools they’ll need to outfit their space. We can help with that too.

There are a lot of items we use in the roastery daily. You’ll find a range of tools in the Mill City roastery that allows for efficiency and safety. 

Consider your goals and what equipment you’ll need to help you reach these. Your wish list may include basic tools like buckets and scoops, or high-quality analysis instruments like the Lighttells CM200. We’ll review a majority of these products in a series of posts to help you outfit your roastery.

Scales

If you’re planning what scale to buy, think about the amount of coffee you’ll be weighing out. Smaller scales like the Jennings CJ4000 are great for weighing smaller doses of green coffee, preparing cuppings, or daily brewing. It’s equipped with a cord to plug into an outlet, and it runs on batteries. It features an easy-to-read LCD display and a high-weight capacity (4000g). We appreciate the durability of this scale and its versatility. 

Another scale we commonly use in the roastery is the Rubbermaid Utility Scale. This floor scale is primarily used for weighing green coffee in larger quantities and is a great mid-budget option. If you’re looking for a different option, we like tabletop scale the CPWPlus. You’ll see us using this as we package coffee in our roastery, or in our Roasting Class as we prepare greens for students to roast.

Buckets

As we look at buckets and tools for handling green and roasted coffee it’s important to prioritize food safety. Green coffee is a known allergen and separating the tools that come into contact with it is especially important.

In our roastery, we use colored gallon buckets to move raw green coffee beans and white NSF gallon buckets for roasted coffee. NSF buckets are food-safe buckets. Make sure to keep these separate from your green coffee buckets. Green coffee should only go in buckets for green coffee. We do not use them interchangeably.

Scoops

In the same way that we designate different buckets for different types of coffee, we’re also separating which scoops are used for green and roasted coffee. A quality and well-built scoop can be extremely helpful especially if you don’t have a weigh/fill in your space. For roasted coffee, we like the Rattlewear beans scoop for its lightweight, durability, and seamless build. 

If we’re packaging green coffee in any capacity we’re generally using our weigh/fill machine, or clear pitchers with gradated measurements. We carry both the 4QT container which holds about 5lbs of green coffee , and the 1QT pitcher for smaller doses, closer to 500g.

All of these items have proved to be essential in our production space. While there are many brands of each of these items, these are the tools we recommend for their durability. They stand up to constant use, and the occasional drop, in our roastery. 

Stay tuned as we continue to share what’s in our roastery and recommend more tools for your space.

Click here to read part 2 of this series, which covers what cupping supplies we keep on hand in the roastery.