The IMF 30kg Commercial Roasting Plant is what we have been using for about the past four years to roast our coffee. There's been a lot of questions asked lately about what we use to roast our coffee and why we chose the IMF coffee roaster over other options out there.
The IMF is certainly a bit different to most other roasters out there It is a hot air roaster as opposed to a drum roaster but the way in which it functions enables the roaster to have so much flexibility and control over the roasting process. The clean hot air being cycled through the beans really gives a much cleaner flavour profile to the final product. Do you use an IMF roaster? What do you think of it? Please let us know your thoughts and if you have any questions about it.
Unedited Video Transcript
this is our imf 30 kilo roasting
facility
[Music]
g'day everyone i'm luke and
welcome back to the artisti youtube
channel where we guide you through
all things coffee so you don't miss out
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our next video this is our 30 kilo imf
roasting facility it comes out of
orchard bellow in italy
and it's a little bit different it's
actually a hot air roaster rather than
your traditional
drum roaster a hot air roaster as
opposed to a drum roaster allows us far
more
airflow and control to give us a much
cleaner and crisper coffee
we've had it for about four years now
and we absolutely love it
because we did come from a drum roaster
we did struggle a little bit in the
beginning
because there is so much control with
the airflow and heat that you can have
in this machine
but now we're really happy with the
quality of the coffee we made
so the seven main parts to the imf
roaster which i'm going to take you
through
so let's start at the green bean loader
so this is where it all starts
this is our green bean loader and it
allows us to weigh in
30 kilos of coffee at a time now imf
actually produced a 480 kilo roaster at
a time so you can imagine how big this
would be
loading in that amount of beans and what
it does is it will actually
suck it straight up through this pipe
and pop it straight into the pre-load
hopper
on top of the roaster ready to go in
so this is the preload hopper here and
it will hold that 30 kilos of green bean
coffee
you can see this little window showing
you've got the beans in there ready to
go
and this is the actual roasting drum so
when you're ready
it'll open up a flap and drop those
beans into the 30 kilo roaster
and that is where the hot air is coming
in from the back
roasting those beans and to be able to
do that efficiently you need to be able
to have some amazing control
so we've got a plc so what's a plc you
ask
it's a programmable logic controller and
basically it is a digital interface
that allows you to turn on or off a
switch a motor a fan
a gas element all other types of things
essentially that come back to
easy control so at the moment we're not
roasting coffee
and the roaster is not on so if we have
a look at the top here this is our
actual afterburner
and that can run up to 650 degrees
this is our fan and our cyclone this is
where the coffee is going to
have all the parchment and the husk
caught afterwards
then we've got a fan which is blowing in
the heat to the actual roasting drum
so that's basically a hot line
there is a vortex in this system which
basically allows us to put hot air
or cold air coming through this top part
into the roaster at a very
precise amount of temperature
up the top here you can see this fan
this is actually from the loader we turn
it on and it'll drop our green beam in
so essentially that's the flow of the
coffee beans from the
top chute into the roaster as it's
cooled
it will drop into our cooling tray it'll
come into a destoner
up to a preload hopper
this is actually our shoot which allows
us to put 120 kilos
of beans in our preload hopper for our
blender
so we can have four times 30 kilo lots
of roasted coffee in here
this is our blender which allows us to
blend our four
beans to make a particular blend and
it'll discharge
ready for packing so we talk about
control of a roaster
now in this roaster we can control quite
a few things with a recipe
that recipe allows us at any given
temperature
that the oven essentially or the roaster
is set at
we can change the air temperature that
we're going to be forcing in
onto those beans we can control the drum
speed of how
agitated those beans are going to be
flying around in that hot air
process we can actually then also change
that air speed
so they're the controls that we can pull
on different levers
to make a much better roast and at
different times of the roast we want to
make either more heat or less heat
to affect the parts of the acids and
sugars that we want to change
to make a beautiful roasted coffee and
all of this data here
actually feeds back into a laptop and
that gives us
a graph which we can monitor our bean
temps our air flows
our rate of rise on the beans as well
allowing us to make decisions
of what we would change for the inputs
to the coffee
so when you look at this there's
actually a couple of things going on
you can see that there is a front
overlay this is a full ended roast
this is our heat input this is our
rate of rise on the actual beam
temperature this is our
bean probe itself showing what's
happening
over time and then we've got three
segments our green
our orange and our brown and that's the
different sections
of drying out the green bean your
mailiard
roasting section and then your
development stages of roast
so in there basically we're trying to
either increase the heat
slow it down or speed it up and we're
following
a profile you might be able to see the
light
colored line behind here that is a
background that i'm trying to roast to
so you can see we can repeat over and
over again very easily
and be very consistent in this
particular roast i wanted to come a
little bit quicker
so we ended up about 30 seconds faster
on the total roast time
and first crack came early a little bit
as well
so while the beans are roasting you can
look at the eyesight here and
essentially
take a sample of the roast when you're
happy to finish that roast
they will drop into the cooling tray and
these are an oversized
cooling tray allowing us to take the
heat out of those beans a lot quicker
buy a fan it's just going to suckle the
heat away and effectively that's
actually
snap freezing i guess a bean or
something like that stopping the roast
exactly where we want it to for the
flavor profile we're after
from the cooling tray it's going to go
to the destoner so the bean's going to
come out of here
from the cooling tray and drop into this
chute
and there is a fan which is sucking the
beans up
we have a valve here which allows us to
increase or decrease the amount of
air at that same suction
and there's a window and basically we
can see the beans floating up
and we adjust this lever to make sure
that we're only sucking up beans
and leaving things like rocks nails
metal
all other crazy stuff that you're
getting coffee in this little catch tray
down the bottom
now we've finished for today and i want
to show you what's inside here
because there are a few beans but when
you start to look through it
there are things like volcanic rock this
is super common
to get a lot of rock and again you don't
want
any of this going through your grinder
you know quickly i can just pick out
quite a few rocks now whenever you've
been
behind a coffee machine and you're
grinding away some coffee and here is
bad crunching noise
or your grinder actually stops it could
be a piece of metal
or one of these beautiful rocks going
into your next espresso
so if your roast is not using a d stoner
maybe think about
your grinder blades and hopefully they
don't get damaged
so once the beans have been destoned
essentially they're sucked up into this
top silo
and you've got a choice of what you want
to do with that so around the side here
we could
open this lever up and discard a single
origin
or if we weren't happy with the roast we
could dump that
or you have the choice to then send it
up through this pipe
up to our blender's hopper so the other
thing i want to show you about the
roaster is the afterburner
this runs at about 600 degrees and it
means that anything going out this
exhaust
is essentially burnt so there's no
smells
and it's very good for the environment
now this
roaster particularly has a vortex and
what it's doing is taking
that heat pushing it in to the actual
roaster
with combined airflow through what they
call a vortex system
and that is just super clean beautiful
air to roast coffee with
and as i said huge control so a lot of
places don't have afterburners
the one thing about an imf plant is you
can see we can walk around this whole
thing in such a small footprint
it is amazing how much stuff they can
fit into pretty much a two pallet size
so space is just is amazing i can't you
know
if you look at other roasters out there
they can take up three four times the
amount of space
very easily as we come around the back
here i'll show you one more thing
we've got out of our chaff collector at
the back here so all of the
little silver skins and chaff is going
to be coming out and it's a continual
chuff collector so we just have a bag on
there and it will continue to take
all of that out and people come and
collect it for their gardens
or whatever they want to do at home the
last part of the roasting plant is
the blender so we've got our silo up top
as i said before it can hold for 30 kilo
lots
and once we've put each individual roast
up there it will drop into
our blender and this is actually a front
load blender so it's kind of like your
front load washing machine or dryer and
it's going to circulate those beans
beautifully and make sure that it is
blended nicely
if you look to blend in a cooling tray
it doesn't actually blend as well as
this technology
sure you can do it but if you want
evenness this is definitely the way to
go
and from there simply we just dump them
out into some big tubs
and pack it and ship it to our customers
thanks very much everyone for watching i
hope you've learned a little bit about
the imf roaster
we're going to leave a link below to a
blog that we've written about this and
there's a couple of cool videos that
show how this tech
works also we will do more videos in
this series
about how this actually works a drum
roaster versus a hot air roaster
and also why we chose this for our
coffee roasting company
so guys thanks very much for watching
hey don't forget shoot us a comment
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next video thanks very much
have a great day
