Mill City 10 kg, anyone have experience?

[stolenchurch]

Does anyone have roasting experience on 10kg Northern Roaster imported by Mill City? Most of the reviews on Mil City are around the small roasters, I'm wondering how the bigger ones stack up for commercial scale production?

 

[RedLightRoastery]

Hi! I have been roasting on a 10kg North Roaster from Mill City Roasters for about 6 weeks. Went up from their 1kg roaster also a North. I am a new roastery and am building my business slowly. After some experimenting with time, gas, air, bean quantity, etc. I have found that 8kg is the sweet spot on this roaster where it acts very similar to the 1kg roaster and produces my roasts very consistently. It takes about an hour to warm up and it's ready to go all day. It's very solidly built! Clean welds. Beautiful stainless with only a few areas on some smaller stainless parts that were probably machined using carbon steel equipment and got some carbon residue that rusted. These pieces cleaned up nicely with a scrubber and elbow grease. This machine is infinitely(almost) controllable with air control, gas valve and drum speed. The pictures on the Mill City Roasters site are of my machine. The nice people at Mill City Roasters travelled down to Arkansas to snap some pictures for their site. You can see in their pictures a few of the rust spots. It performs great, the price is right, and Steve answers his phone when I call with questions. I hope I was helpful. Feel free to message me directly with questions.
-Adam

 

[stolenchurch]

Hi Adam, thanks for the info. A hour to heat up sounds like a long time? Does it hold heat fairly well once it is up to temp, or does it always need a lot of gas? Are you using any computer profiling software?

 

[peterjschmidt]

I would say that the amount of time a roaster needs to warm up would be inversely proportionate to how well it holds heat once it's up to temp.

 

[expat]

I've never thought to time how long it takes my roaster to heat up as I'm usually measuring out coffee to roast during that time but it couldn't be more than 15 - 20 minutes. In the past I just let the roaster drum and fan spin after shutting down the burners and it took forever to cool down to 38C which is where I feel good about turning the roaster completely off. Now I use a fan to blow ambient air into the roaster and I can get it to my shut down temp in 30 minutes or so. My roaster has a cast iron drum by the way.

 

[MillCityRoasters]

I would say that the amount of time a roaster needs to warm up would be inversely proportionate to how well it holds heat once it's up to temp.

I emailed Adam last night to ask him why his pre-heat takes so long. He's using a relatively low gas setting and using a "slow and steady" approach to ensure his first batch is completely consistent with each successive roast.

Although I often do the same myself, he could be more agressive and cut that time to less than 30 minutes.

 

[peterjschmidt]

Another consideration regarding warm-up times... I will often choose the first batches in my roasting session based on size or intended roast level; perhaps I have a coffee that I don't need a full batch of, or a coffee that I'll roast to City, and do those first; even with a roaster that is not completely warmed up those batches will still roast fine.

 

[RedLightRoastery]

Good morning! Just getting back to this thread. The roaster will heat up much quicker than 1 hour, I'm sure. I set the gas at 10% while I'm setting up my roast day, prepping bags, printing labels, measuring out beans, brewing coffee, sipping coffee, etc. That can take me an hour depending on orders. After an hour at 10% the drum temp is >400f. The 10kg roaster takes quite a while to cool down to <100f and at that point I shut it down. I haven't timed cool down, but I will today and let you know.
Get Roasted!
-Adam