Our Roasting System...

At the center of our roastery are two ROURE drum roasters: a 30-kilo and a 70-kilo. ROURE has been building roasting equipment in Barcelona since 1948, and its machines come from an era of industrial equipment designed around heavy construction, mechanical simplicity, and a long working life.

That heritage is part of why we continue to use them. They're substantial machines with characteristics we've come to know extremely well. They're also not perfect.

Older production roasters were designed around a different philosophy than much of today's specialty-coffee equipment. Controls can be comparatively simple, adjustments less precise, and the relationship between burner, drum, airflow, exhaust, and batch size takes time to understand. Two machines of different capacities don't necessarily respond identically, either. A profile developed on our 30-kilo isn't something we can simply scale up mathematically and expect our 70-kilo to reproduce. Each machine has its own thermal behavior.

Over years of roasting, modifying, tasting, and learning, we've become intimately familiar with those characteristics. Instead of replacing the Roures with newer machines, we've continually worked on them and adapted them to our needs.

Today, they're something of a hybrid: traditional European drum roasters underneath, modern production roasting systems on top.

The Challenges

One of the pleasures, and frustrations, of working with equipment like this is that the machine doesn't hide much from the roaster.

Large drum roasters carry considerable thermal energy. Changes in gas or airflow don't instantly produce a corresponding change in the coffee, and learning when to make an adjustment can matter as much as the adjustment itself. Batch size, environmental conditions, machine temperature, airflow, and the characteristics of the green coffee all influence how a roast progresses.

Airflow presents its own challenge. Pulling air through a drum affects the movement of heat, smoke, and chaff through the roasting system. Too little or poorly managed airflow can create one set of problems; excessive exhaust can pull heat through the system differently than intended. Add an afterburner, cyclone, ductwork, and fans, and the entire exhaust system becomes part of the behavior of the roaster.

We've spent a great deal of time learning those relationships.

The goal hasn't been to turn our Roures into another manufacturer's machine. It has been to preserve the characteristics we value while addressing the areas where modern technology genuinely gives us better control.

How We've Upgraded Them

Modern Burner Control

One of the most significant changes we've made is modernizing the burner systems.

Roasting is fundamentally an exercise in controlling energy. Traditional burner controls can make that adjustment relatively coarse. Modern burner and gas-control systems give us much finer authority over how much energy we're introducing and when we're introducing it.

That becomes particularly important as a roast progresses. The coffee itself is changing constantly: losing moisture, becoming more porous, releasing gases, and responding differently to heat than it did only minutes earlier. Rather than simply running a burner at a handful of fixed settings, our upgraded system allows us to make much more deliberate changes throughout the roast.

The machine still provides the heat. The upgrade gives us a finer hand on the valve.

Computers, Sensors & Roast Data

We've also brought modern measurement and computer control into machines that were never originally designed around it.

Temperature sensors and roast software allow us to watch the progression of a batch in real time and record what actually happened. Instead of relying only on elapsed time and final temperature, we can examine the trajectory of the roast, including how quickly temperature is changing and how the machine responded to adjustments in heat and airflow.

More importantly, we can compare that information with what ultimately matters: how the coffee tastes.

When we find a roast we love on the cupping table, we have a detailed record of how we produced it. When something isn't right, we have information that helps us understand why.

That feedback loop of roast, measure, taste, adjust, repeat is a major part of how we work.

Automation Without Autopilot

We've incorporated automation into both machines, but our intention has never been to remove the roaster from roasting.

Modern roasting systems can record and reproduce changes to gas and airflow, making production much more repeatable. That's particularly valuable when roasting coffee day after day. Once we've developed a profile, automation can reliably reproduce many of the mechanical adjustments that would otherwise have to be made manually at exactly the right moment.

But repeatability isn't the same thing as judgment.

Coffee changes. Different lots behave differently, green coffee changes as it ages, and environmental and machine conditions vary. Our roasters are still responsible for watching what is happening and deciding when a roast needs intervention.

We think of automation as a very precise extra set of hands. It executes the routine movements consistently so that the person roasting can pay more attention to the coffee.

Variable-Speed Airflow

Variable-speed fans have been another important part of modernizing our Roures.

Airflow is one of the major controls available to a drum roaster, but on traditional machines that control can be relatively limited. By controlling fan speed, we have much greater authority over the movement of air through the roasting system.

That gives us another way to shape how heat moves through the coffee while also managing smoke and chaff as the roast develops.

It isn't simply a matter of "more airflow is better." Changing airflow changes the behavior of the entire roasting system. Learning how our burners, fans, drums, batch sizes, ducting, and afterburners interact has been a significant part of learning these machines.

That complexity is also what makes the control useful. We can choose how the machine behaves rather than accepting a single fixed airflow condition.

Sustainability & Emissions

Roasting coffee requires energy, and we don't think it is useful to pretend otherwise.

Our Roures are combustion-based machines, and roasting itself produces smoke, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, and other gases. Managing those emissions is therefore an important part of operating a responsible production roastery.

Our roasting systems use modern afterburner technology to treat exhaust before it leaves the facility. Afterburners, more technically known as thermal oxidizers, bring roasting exhaust to temperatures high enough to oxidize many of its combustible compounds, substantially reducing the smoke, odors, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds released untreated into the surrounding air.

There is a tradeoff: thermal oxidation itself requires energy. For that reason, we prefer to talk about emissions honestly rather than label a piece of equipment "green" simply because it is newer. Efficient burners, appropriate afterburner operation, variable-speed motors, good maintenance, and thoughtful production scheduling all contribute to reducing unnecessary energy use while maintaining effective emissions control.

There is another aspect of sustainability that matters to us as well: using equipment for a very long time.

Instead of discarding two substantial industrial machines and replacing them simply because newer technology became available, we've continued investing in the equipment we already own. Motors, burners, sensors, electronics, controls, and emissions equipment can be repaired or modernized while the fundamental structure of the roaster continues doing the job it was built to do.

ROURE itself now follows this philosophy, offering modernization programs intended to give existing roasters a second life through updated automation and control systems.

We like that approach. Keep the good iron. Improve what can be improved. Maintain it properly. Understand its limitations. And keep making it better.

Technology in Service of Craft

After all of these modifications, our 30- and 70-kilo Roures are probably quite different from the machines that originally left Barcelona.

That's intentional.

We're not interested in technology simply for the sake of having a more sophisticated control panel. Every modification has been made because it gives our roasting team better information, better control, greater consistency, or a cleaner and more efficient way to operate.

The computer doesn't decide how we want a coffee to taste. Neither does the automation.

Those decisions still happen through sourcing, sample roasting, production roasting, cupping, experimentation, and experience. Technology helps us translate those decisions into something repeatable.

Our Roures have quirks. They require attention. We've had to solve problems and learn things about heat, airflow, combustion, controls, and exhaust that a newer turnkey machine might have solved for us out of the box.

But after years of working with them, they're no longer just ROURE roasters.

They're our roasting system.