Coffee is excellent at Mountain Phoenix Coffee: Meet our Roaster

Love at first sight!

Say Hello to the Diedrich IR-12!  This roaster has become my best friend and an absolute blessing in my quest to roast the greatest coffees in the Rockies. Diedrich is a name that is synonymous with coffee roasting, and the machines they make are among  the best in the world.

Coffee roasting is all about time, temperature and heat transfer.  What I love SO much about this roaster is the different  ways that it allows me to vary the heat in my roasting profiles. While other roasters rely solely on a limited way of heating, the Diedrich roasters allow me to transfer heat in three ways: Convective, conductive, and radiant. By balancing all these variations, I can create a finished product that is just unbeatable! (The guy in the green shirt helps a little too!)

A bad turn, a funny story:

I got into the roasting business after the original Sacred Ground Coffee Shop, was totally destroyed by a fire. No one was injured but it did present me with both a setback and an amazing opportunity.  When I had the cafe rebuilt, I decided to start a roastery in the adjoining space. From Coffee Shop owner to Coffee Roaster in four short months? Impossible? A miracle?  Sometimes you just got to do what you gotta do. When I looked around for the best possible machine to do the job what I came up with over and over was The Diedrich IR-12. Once that love connection was made, I knew everything else was going to fall into place.

A friend and I waited outside the newly completed Mountain Phoenix Coffee Roaster for the truck bringing my roaster for installation. It was only two weeks until The Grand Opening, of Sacred Ground Coffee AND Mountain Phoenix Coffee Roasters…I was getting a little nervous.  After what seemed like HOURS of waiting, we saw the Diedrich truck…but it passed right by us and didn’t even slow down! Turns out, the driver forgot to strap the roaster down after his last stop in Canon City, and the Roaster rolled off  the truck as it made its way through the winding Canyon road to Salida.  Knowing that he had just wrecked $20,000 worth of hardware, he just kept on driving!  To this day I still feel a twinge of sympathy for that dude. A rolled roaster and just a few days to go…

Well, it turns out what started out as one of the worst days of my life was transformed into one of the best.  Since I never got delivery of the Roaster…Diedrich still officially owned the machine.

I called the Company that morning, totally freaking out! Each and every roaster is custom built, and they usually don’t have extras on hand, which meant I’d have to wait two months for another one. After hours of waiting, The Plant Manager called and said, “We’ve have found another IR-12, it’s red, and fully loaded: stainless steel plating, external lighting, upgraded cooling bin, etc…etc..Do you want this one? We’ll give it to you for the same price.”

A shop burns down, a bigger shop appears, a roaster takes a tumble and a better one shows up.  So, If you’re patient and trusting, maybe the universe will invite you to the dance.

Thursday, January 8th, 2009, by bjoslin and is filed under "Coffee Roasting, Coffee Blog, Coffee equipment, Coffee Roaster ". You can leave a response here, or send a Trackback from your own site.