SOME ASSEMBLY DESIRED

Refurbishing Roasters
Means a Love of Labor

OLD ROASTERS ARE LIKE classic cars. They have that intangible…something…that makes you want to run your hands over their curves and putter with their ball bearings. They practically entice you to shine them up or custom paint them or take them apart so you can put them back together piece by piece.
     But there’s more to refurbishing roasters than the chance to ooh and aah over them. Older roasters are industrial workhorses, built to take a beating and keep on heating. On the other hand, they don’t have many of the bells and whistles of today’s machines—try to find an old roaster with a built-in bean probe or a profile system and you’re likely to be out of luck. They also might not come with any kind of guarantee or warranty, which means that if something goes wrong, you’ll be on your own.
     If you’re just getting into roasting, adding a second roaster or thinking about upgrading, then you’ve probably thought about whether you should purchase a used roaster or whether you’d be better off with a brand-new piece of equipment. The answers revolve around costs, taste profiles, time and company brand.
     “The usability of the second-hand equipment needs to be carefully assessed in the light of a customer’s specific requirements,” says Stephan Lange, managing director at Probat. “Adaptations and alterations are quite frequent in making sure that the customer gets the desired quality and best results.”
For some roasting companies, an older roaster seems the obvious—and only—choice. “We were growing and we needed a larger roaster, but we had some financial considerations, and knowing what we could afford, a refurbished roaster seemed the way to go,” says Matthew Huested, who co-owns Louisville, Ky-based Sunergos Coffee with Brian Miller. “Also, we wanted to invest our money into a piece of equipment that would outlive us, and just be a tank, and that seems to be true of older roasters as well.”
     Additional considerations are the labor involved and the end result. “One of the big questions pertains to what motivates you to do it,” says Huested. “Some of it is aesthetic and beauty. There is labor, which is costly, but it’s less costly if it’s your pleasure to do it. You end up with something that may be functional as a roaster, but if not, you end up with something beautiful.”

Endangered Species

One advantage to buying an older roaster is that you can get more bang for your buck. Sometimes. Roasters tell stories of hunting for years for the roaster of their dreams, only to find one and realize they can’t afford it. That’s because, like with most vintage products, there’s a scarcity of old roasters out there.
     The typical places to hunt down roasters are varied. The most common source is companies who specialize in refurbishing and reselling old roasters. But roasters will go to any length to find their “baby”—from hitting up all their friends, to haunting companies that are going out of business, to scouring the listings on Craigslist and even eBay.
     Often, the perfect older roaster will show up, like love, when you least expect it or when you’ve finally given up on it.
     For Huested, the journey to the company’s roaster was as long and convoluted as you might imagine. “We were shopping all of the websites that offer used equipment, as well as eBay, to get an idea of what things would go for,” he says. The company bought their first roaster—a 10K STA Impianti—on eBay, so they thought their second one would come that way as well. They found a 60K Petroncini they liked, but didn’t end up winning it. They also knew someone in Nova Scotia with the same machine, but he wasn’t selling. Just when they had started thinking about going another direction, the gentleman in Nova Scotia called them up. “His father was retiring and they were moving to a smaller roaster, so he asked if we wanted it,” Huested says. “So we worked out all the details—including shipping it and brokering it across the border. It arrived in three massive crates. We borrowed a forklift from friends and borrowed a friend who knew how to run a forklift and we were on our way.”
     Using similar methods, Caleb Nicholes, co-owner of Kickapoo Coffee in Viroqua, Wisc., was able to pick up a roaster that is rumored to not even exist: a G-30 Probat from the 1930s. They’d purchased a new, larger facility and needed something with more capacity than their 10K Ambex. “We literally stumbled onto the G-30,” Nicholes says. “We had tasted everyone’s coffee we could, and we’d decided to go the vintage route. But finding machines is super hard; they just get sucked up.” Their search led them to Dan Joliff of Roasters Exchange, and he mentioned that he might know of a vintage German roaster somewhere in New Mexico.
     They tracked down the machine. Not only was it in usable shape, it was nearly untouched. “It’s pure cast iron, even the legs, and everything was original,” Nicholes says. “No one had drilled holes in it for probes, all the burners were original, it even had the original chaff can.”
     With a little help from friends and industry experts, they took the machine apart and rebuilt it. The machine, which is all belt driven, also got a few upgrades, including a motor frequency control drive.

Time or Money?

Refurbishing an old roaster may be cheaper in terms of money, but there’s the time investment to consider as well. And if you think that time cost is going to be a few weeks, or even a few months, you’re likely underestimating the work that goes into refurbishing.
     “Our intention was that we would pull the drum out, clean it and leave it as is,” says Huested of their refurbishing process. “Initially we were telling our customers, ‘We can bust this thing out in three weeks.’”
     Instead, they ended up taking the entire machine apart down to the individual bolts, and then sand-blasting, cleaning and converting it to natural gas. What was going to be a three-week process turned into a nine-month endeavor. “It was worth it, but now I know that you have to expect it to take a long time. Be prepared, and don’t break down your current roaster until you’re ready to switch.”

Love the One You’ve Got

Sometimes roasters are in the situation where they need to rebuild or refurbish a roaster they already own. Bob Arceneaux, CEO and green buyer for Coffee Roasters of New Orleans, now located in Kenner, La., tells the story of rebuilding the company’s roaster after Hurricane Katrina. “Due to the levee break, our roasting facility flooded,” he says. “We lost everything. Our two roasters (24K and 40K) sat in six feet of water for a few days. They were yellow to begin with, but they turned brown.”
     The roasters sat for eight months before they could be disassembled and moved to the company’s new location. As they were getting ready to send the roaster off to be furbished, Arceneaux says, “I tried to get the 40K roaster on the truck with a forklift, and I picked the roaster up from the wrong side. It flipped it over and it came crashing down on its backside. That nasty water and some beans came out of it. Whew, nasty.”
     Since then, the machine’s been sand-blasted and had all its small parts replaced, including a newly designed control panel. It’s currently awaiting its first roasting job in its new condition. “We’ll run four bags of ‘aged’ Mexican through it before it goes into production, now that we have the machine back,” Arceneaux says. “This machine rocks!

Nuts and Bolts

If you’re going to refurbish your baby, there are some helpful tips from those who have been there—and learned the hard way.
     “Don’t lose any little bitty parts,” recommends Arceneaux. “Put them in little bags, mark them, take pictures of them. Do a good job cleaning parts. Just do it right the first time. Ask the manufacturer lots of questions if you have any doubts about anything.”
     Most would also recommend following the manufacturer’s handbook or guidebook—if you can get it. Jim Cleaves, manager of coffee excellence at Dunkin Brands Inc., in Canton, Mass., tells of rebuilding a Probat roaster back in the 1970s. After weeks of working to rebuild the machine, Cleaves finally convinced his boss to get a manual, which arrived weeks later. In German.
     “I found a German language scholar at a local school who said he could translate it,” Cleaves says. “But he turned out be a specialist in a highly romantic, medieval type of German. So, instead of a translation that had words like ‘shaft’ or ‘set screw’ ours would refer to the ‘heavenly light that comes from the clouds’ (you know how they can look like shafts) and the ‘point of destiny’ (that would be the set screw...).”
     It took a while, but they eventually waded through their romance-book version of a manual and ended up with a great machine. “It is amazing we ever got it going, but so we did, and the results were really wonderful,” he says.
     If you don’t have the handbook, or don’t have a language scholar handy, then scour the online sites, ask everyone you know and consider hiring someone to help. “If you have a question that is not covered in the manual, then you have many resources to tap into, including calling or e-mailing the tech support of the manufacturer itself or using online forums,” recommends Don Vining, service manager/sales for Ambex Inc. “Online forums are a great resource for obtaining information for all makes of roasters. You can ask your questions and you may even fall upon a few questions asked by your peers that you would have never thought to ask.”
     Of course, even once you’ve finished the job, you haven’t actually finished the job. After all that work, it would be devastating to have a fire, or even to just have the roaster turning out bad coffee because something’s clogged. “Routine maintenance is a must,” says Vining. ”If you take care of your investment, it will take care of you. The most neglected and arguably the most important part of roasting is maintenance.”

Love’s Labor

Refurbishing, refinishing and maintaining old roasters is a lot of work, to be sure. But those who’ve done it admit that the rewards are far greater than the effort. And they even say they’d do it all over again. A true testament to true love.
     “We found the process to be an amazingly worthwhile endeavor,” says Huested. “First, we have what is essentially an as-good-as-new roaster for an amazing savings. Also, there’s the personal reward of it—we’re intimate with this roaster, sweated over it, invested ourselves in it. And we’re not afraid of it. There’s nothing that machine can throw at us in terms of maintenance issues that we don’t know how to deal with. We’d do it all over again in a second.”