As you must suspect, coffee roasting is quite an art! Today’s coffee roasters must rise to the challenge of serving you a coffee that suits your particular tastes, produced by efficient methods that are respectful of the environment. This brings us to why, at Brûlerie des Monts, we have opted for a revolutionary technology that offers the same roasting characteristics as our original roaster (which remains in service!): the Italian IMF RM-15 roaster.
Before telling you why this technology significantly boosts our production capacity, let’s catch up with a little helpful background.
Roasting… from yesteryear to today
Did you know that coffee roasting first originated with the Ethiopians and goes back over 1000 years? We could say that this technique of “cooking raw coffee beans” has made quite an evolution over the years. At the outset, coffee was prepared for consumption by infusing the leaves and their berries. Then, starting in the 15th century, it was roasted in an ordinary frying pan!
True coffee roasting only began in the early 19th century, when manual grinders became available for home use.
Not until the early 1900s did the first roasting houses equipped with production workshops and ovens appear, at a time when capitalism was gaining momentum, leading to the era of industrialized coffee.
In the 2000s, the quest for higher quality came to the fore, with the advent of specialty coffees. We now like our coffee made with superior quality beans that meet precise standards with regard to cultivation and distribution methods. Added to the mix are current urgent global concerns about environmental impacts.
However, in order to be able to make and reproduce the largest quantity of coffee possible for specific tastes, while roasting with techniques that are respectful of the environment, as we have done since 1995, it became imperative to equip ourselves with state of the art equipment. And this so as to allow us to reproduce roasting profiles that match those of coffees roasted on the Petroncini (the original roaster). At Brûlerie des Monts, we decided to innovate in this sense by choosing our new coffee roaster, the IMF.
When the best of tradition meets innovation
The principle of roasting is simple: coffee beans are composed of 10-12% humidity. By heating them, this moisture evaporates, creating a flux of water that leaves the heart of the bean toward the outside.
Over the years, roasting techniques have been refined, but the principle remains the same. Thanks to our new coffee roaster, we are therefore following the wave of innovation in order to maintain our reputation for the best coffee in the world!
Founded in 1994 in Italy, IMF specializes in innovative solutions for the coffee industry. Their compact commercial roasters are the best that current technology can offer to artisan roasters like ours that desire to offer ‘smooth’ drum roasting. That is to say, there are no flames that touch either the grains or the drum.
Thanks to their Vortex and Equalizer systems, these new roasters can roast various batches of coffee maintaining uniform consistency. Thus, the roaster is able to reproduce the same cooking profile for the first and last lots of the day.
Moreover, these roasters use a combustion chamber specially designed to heat the oven and treat emissions simultaneously. This technology allows for a reduction of at least 30% of the amount of gas consumed compared to traditional machines with post combustion, such as our original roaster.
In more precise terms, the Vortex mixes the ambient air into the hot air flow before it enters into the roasting process. The air is thus at the correct temperature before entering the drum, which guarantees a uniform and constant temperature throughout the roasting and browning process.
As for the Equalizer system, this controls the entry of the same volume of air during roasting. It allows for uniform heat distribution on the surface of the coffee beans and eliminates any temperature fluctuations inside the drum.
Want to know what’s the most awesome? By using this new technology, which we are currently the only ones in Canada to have, our traditional methods are preserved.
Now, let’s aside technique and get down to putting it into practice by coming to taste our new deliciously balanced coffee! We can’t wait to have you taste it.
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