It seems crazy when I think about it that three and a half years ago when I started roasting coffee on the 5kg batch roaster - doing a couple of roasts to get 10kg of roasted felt like so much, starting from scratch there is no demand and I always wanted to be an "on demand" coffee roaster - not your commercial roast in bulk and store it for months before sending it to customers - I wanted my coffee to be roasted fresh and sent in many case the day it was roasted, or within a few weeks or so. After roasting sealing it in valve bags does keep it fresh really well - but in a competitive market you need an edge and being "super fresh" really helps because your customers appreciate it and return because of it.
In December 2019 when I finally bit the bullet and ordered this monster 30kg Batch roaster to support my increased demand from coffee shops, restaurants and hotels - I never thought that three months later all those commercial customers would be shut because of Coronavirus - and many are still now six months later. Since the 30kg big green coffee roasting machine arrived in early April right in the middle of UK Coronavirus Lockdown I have been busy putting it all together - and to be honest I'm quite proud of what I have achieved, the manufacturer normally send a two man team to build and test these industrial machines. I put it together myself, wired in all the six external motors and skyped the factory to check the rotation of each motor and adjust the phase if required of each one (This beast is not like your live, neutral earth standard appliance - it runs on three phase - so there are three live wires, a neutral and an earth - depending on how the live phases are wired dictates the direction the motor spins). Plus I ordered, cut, hung and connected all the 300mm silver ducting to exhaust the roaster smoke outside myself. The gas supply and three phase power feed were installed by accredited contractors - you need an expert for these things. And I'm slowly making the whole space look better, painting and trimming the wall and ceiling - it's not just a space for me to roast there will be in future many people visiting to see the equipment working who might purchase it themselves.
Back to today, and six batches - 130kg total of coffee roasted, that is insane really. And it was all needed, not every kilo of every batch left today or tomorrow - but a good chunk and the rest will be gone by next week. And that did not cover all my orders - I need to do a good seven more batches in the smaller 5kg batch roaster tomorrow to complete current orders, let alone new ones. This is the agony of choice, I offer just over 21 single origins to purchase roasted, and they sell in varying amounts so I do have around six really popular regulars then fifteen that are slower sellers but if someone order 8 different origins in one order - that mixes things up a little! Life would be super easy if I only roasted two or three origins and then I could just do 30kg batches of those every few days, but just like Freshness is a selling point, so in a competitive market is a wide range of Origins. Nobody I know of in the UK has six different Roasted Brazilian coffee's on offer.
Of course a year ago today I was in Brazil visiting coffee plantations, and I now stock two different Arabicas from Bruno (far right is me, just in case you forgot what I look like, and then in the dark glasses is Bruno) Fazenda Inhame and of course the awesome Yellow Bourbon from the cool dudes at Fazenda do Lobo #followthewolf
and the Brazilian coffee goes alongside Colombian, Ethiopian, Indonesian, Tanzania, Peru, Guatemala, Yemen, Kenya, Honduras, Mexico, Cuba, Jamaica Blue Mountain, El Salvador, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Thailand and my four custom blends - White Rose Coffee Roasters - Hardly any roasters offer so many different origins, it's too much work. And it is a whole load of work, but my customers always tell me they love the choice - and discovering new tastes and flavours from around the world - that makes the hard work worthwhile.
And it's a wrap, the final 30kg of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe dropped to cool. It's being a long, hard, stressful 2020 so far and I'm sure I'm not alone in that - but what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
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I distribute coffee roasting machines and also espresso coffee machines and roast my own Speciality Coffee Range. being one of the premium coffee suppliers Yorkshire including a wide range of filter coffee sachets. Finally I have a dedicated website to my Artisan small batch roasted coffee featuring roast and post packs and super easy coffee subscriptions.
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