This roaster is our baby. The centre of the whole Switch operation, and we love it. You ask the boss Hamish what he thinks about it, and he’ll tell you “What a beast! It’s fucking awesome.”
Truer words have never been said. This Joper CRS-30 roaster is a premium, high-tech masterpiece that helps us pump out consistent, extremely high quality roasts. It’s a commercial-sized roaster, double the size of our previous baby, processing 30kg of beans at a time.
We did a lot of research, asked around other roasters, got recommendations, and found the perfect machine for what we need. The roaster came all the way from Portugal and cost as much as Hamish’s first house, but it was well worth it for the amazing coffee we get.
It’s a hot-air roaster, so instead of having gas flames directly on the roasting drums, there’s basically box of hot air underneath, which prevents burned bits of coffee from hot spots on the drum.
The consistent quality is the main thing, but we also love to talk about the tech this roaster is packing. It’s semi-automatic, which is the perfect blend of control and consistency that we need.
Every time we run a roast, we ‘record’ it in the roaster’s computer. That means that next time we’re roasting the same type of beans, we can do everything exactly the same – the timing down to the second and the temperature variations down to a point of a degree.
We can control all of those variables, and if taste testing reveals something slightly less than stellar, we can adjust the recorded roast so it’s perfect next time. We even get the manufacturers to log in from Portugal and run their own roasts on our machine so they can tweak things here and there for optimal performance.
It’s absolutely not all about automation: roasting coffee is a really enjoyable thing. It’s a mixture of an art and a science. You pay attention to colours smells and sounds, so you’re using almost all your senses. And the accurate digital printouts we now get supplement our own expertise for incredible control and consistency.
If you’re interested, drop into Industrie Espresso Bar for a coffee, and you’ll likely be able to poke your head around the corner to the roastery and see this beauty for yourself.
