Toys 4 the boys - scaling up a hottop roast to 60KG batches

[midnight_storm]

I am pursuading a pal who roasts commercially, to buy a hottop, I want to experiment and I figure he can benefit from whatever we cook up. The question is will the small electric batch compare with 60kg from the large drum unit, if we find a blend and roast colour that works. The drum roaster does a batch in 17min and with the new upgrade should have 50% more btu available from next week? Too fast ? Too slow at present? different roast profile from the hottop? All ideas / opinions welcome

Colin

[ivdp]

I would be very interested to hear what your guy is saying after a couple of roasts with the Hottop, without having him influenced with "our advice"

Ivo

[Steve]

I think there’s a lot of other advice out there about the Hottop not just here. You only have to peek at the sweetmarias list or alt coffee or coffee geek, to find a lot of advocates for the Hottop.

I'm biased so I won’t "cloud the view" but enough to say a major European green bean importer is happy enough to promote them and sell them as sample roasters to the "big boys". That’s a good endorsement in my book of its capability’s and final result.

[ivdp]

Hottop sample roaster.
I am not saying that they are not promoting the Hottop as a sample roaster to the big boys but . .
if you quickly want to roast several lots of coffee samples, a Hottop is highly impractical.
capacity wise and time wise.

If this would be an endorsement, than what do you say to the amount of HPR's that were sold as sample roasters to small and big guys in consuming and in producing countries .. ?


Ivo

[tisri]

If you want to roast 60kg at a time all you need is 240 Hottops

[Steve]

I guess if you want to roast serval lots of coffee samples they will take the same where ever you do them, or am I missing the point?

The HPR was completley different machine and I think you are missing the point. I also dont remeber any one telling me that the HPR was a good sample roaster, at least anyone in trade (although I did use one for a while).

[ivdp]

Yes you ar missing the pint Steve.
A commercial sample is often rather small - 100g or so.
It is far more practical to use a HPR for such small samples than Alp or Hottop.

I have been selling more than 100 HPR's to growers/exporters in several origins contries from Ethiopia to Haiti, from Brazil to Indonesia and Vietnam.
One of the big roasters in the world as been ordering 10's of HPR's for in house testing.

It makes much more sense to use for sample testing a small machine that is (very) cheap and can be carried around easily than a heavy and large and rather expensive machine.

One of my Indonesian clients has lost 3 HPR's in a striking lightning. He was very pleased the machines were cheap.

Ivo

[phil]

I think this discussion is moot.

People will use whatever they like as a sample roaster if it works for them in their situation, be it a HPR, a Hottop or a double-barreled Probat.

The fact remains that Steve knows of a world-renowned UK-based coffee importer who is offering the Hottop as a potential sample roaster to his smaller clients. Ivo knows of people who use HPRs for the same job. So do I. Steve for one, at least in the past anyway. Peter James for another.

You're entitled to your opinion about whether people taking this direction are making a mistake Ivo, but now that we've aired the issues let's move on eh?

[zix]

To roast 60kg in one batch, in 17 minutes, how does the heating system work? Is this really a drum or is it some kind of conveyor, so that the beans move through heatzones?
Just to move things on, I´ll stick my rookie nose into the fray: If such a big bean mass is roasted in a drum, the way the bean mass reacts must differ (more evenly and with more inertia in a big batch) compared to any small drum roast, and also the way the heat distributes in the drum, so the individual beans would look different even if roasted to the same overall darkness.
The hottop roasts 250g/batch, yes?

[midnight_storm]

The machine is a 60 kg drum roaster, with loads of heat going in, the hottop is 250gms with an equivilent rate for its size, also drum. I am hoping the profile is going to be similar. With the big machine I know 1 of the roasters will kill the heat after the 1st crack and coast to the second, the other roaster tends to go full on to the second crack and dumps the beans to cool when the colour is right, this leaves the drum hot and ready to drop in the next batch. The end result seems very similar however