Loring Coffee Roaster - S35 Kestral

Our New Roaster - Loring S35 Kestrel

Those of you that already buy our coffee will know that we are obsessed with attention to detail, selecting the best coffees we can find and approaching roasting with a focus on the science. During the last three and a half years we roasted all our coffee on our two Joper drum roasters. These are fantastic machines, well built with excellent software and easy cropster integration for accurate data logging and roast tracking. 

During 2018 we decided to look at ways that we could improve our capacity, production efficiency, quality and reduce our CO2 emissions. Drum roasters from manufacturers like Probat, Giesen, Toper and Joper use a combination of convention and conductive heat from the drum. The heat source is usually a burner and an exhaust system that sends the smoke out through a chimney. Larger roasters often require an afterburner to reduce smoke emissions but these use a significant amount of gas and massively increase CO2 emissions. They deal very well with the particulate matter found in smoke but the trade off is high gas consumption and CO2 emissions. It's a trade off that always made us feel a bit uncomfortable.

After some serious thinking we decided that the best option for us would be to make a serious push to define ourselves as a roastery focusing not only on great coffee and ethics but also our environmental impact. The only way we could do this was by upgrading our roaster to a Loring S35.

The Loring coffee roaster concept came about in 1998 when Mark Loring Ludwig became frustrated with his inefficient and unreliable coffee roaster. So he decided to start designing his own roasting system. Rather than just do what everyone else was doing he decided to find a way to roast with lower emissions, smokeless output and greater reliability. It took 5 years to design and build the first machine. The small factory in California now makes just 4 different size roasters all based on the same concept of smokeless roasting with low emissions. The video below explains how the system works:

 

The Loring roasters are designed to roast using convection and the burner system incinerates smoke leaving the drum and then recirculates hot air. This single burner with re circulation system can reduce gas usage and CO2 emissions but up to 70%. One of our main areas of focus for the coming year will be our impact on the environment. We are very excited to have significantly reduced our roasting emissions, you can now enjoy the same great quality coffees but with the added eco benefits!

Here is the new Loring S35 in place at the roastery:

Loring coffee roaster

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