Chris Abele (Knickerbocker roaster)
Production drums, New York, New York State, United States.
History
The workshop was not born with Abele. In 1868, Thomas Page, a millwright in New York, began building a so-called “pull-out” roaster. He built it on the model of the machine James W. Carter had patented in 1846. Pull-out means just that: the cylinder was pulled out of the firebox to be emptied, and the oven cooled with every batch. Chris Abele was a foreman in that workshop, then took over the business. The date of this takeover is not recorded. His opportunity came from elsewhere: the Burns patent of 1864, the first that allowed emptying without removing the cylinder from the fire, fell into the public domain. Building became free. Abele then filed his own version on September 14, 1881, and obtained it on March 7, 1882, under number 254,582. He sold it under the name Knickerbocker, the old nickname of New Yorkers of Dutch descent. The Hungerfords, father and son, brought out a rival machine the same year. Abele died in 1910, and his son-in-law Gottfried Bay took over the firm.
What it makes
A single type of machine, the production drum roaster, built into a brick oven. The cylinder is heavy sheet metal, perforated, and turns above an open charcoal grate. This is direct heating: the flame and the gases from the firebox touch the metal and pass through the perforations to the bean. The front, for its part, does not move. A round flanged plate, bolted into the front plate of the oven, carries the end of the cylinder by a hub and its bearing. This plate closes the drum and takes everything: the charging hopper at the top, the discharge door at the bottom, an opening for the sampling spoon. Around it, the oven opening is left about two inches wider, or five centimeters. This free ring lets air, gases and released matter escape continuously, so that the cylinder does not clog. The bearing is drilled from below, so that the lubricating oil runs out instead of reaching the coffee. Above the hopper, a funnel leads fumes and gases to the chimney flue, and the patent provides for housing a fan there to strengthen the draft.
The models
The range is not established, and it is better to say so than to reconstruct it. No Abele catalog has been found, and Ukers gives no list of sizes. Only one machine is named in the sources: the Knickerbocker, sold over a wide territory. The patent gives no capacity figure. It says only that the hopper is sized to take a bag of coffee at once. The Rio bag of that period weighed 160 to 175 pounds, or 73 to 79 kilos, according to a roaster cited by Ukers. This is an order of magnitude, not a capacity announced by the manufacturer. A testimony collected by Ukers mentions two cylinders “of the Chris Abele type” installed in one shop, so these machines were mounted in batteries.
What you gain
The cylinder never leaves the fire. It is charged through the hopper and emptied through the lower door, with the machine turning. The brick oven and the metal mass stay hot between batches. The next batch therefore starts from a stable thermal state, which Carter's pull-out drum did not allow. The opening in the front plate receives a spoon during rotation: one judges by the bean, not by the smoke. The free two-inch ring evacuates gases and released matter continuously, so the bean does not cook in its own fumes.
What you lose
Direct heating on an open grate burns the surface of the bean if the charge is small or the fire lively. Nothing stands between the flame and the perforated sheet. A charcoal fire cannot be shut off: one acts on the draft, and the correction arrives late. Emptying depends on spiral plates fixed in the cylinder, so the coffee keeps cooking while it comes out. The patent provides no blown cooler, only a box pushed under the chute. Finally, the bolted front makes it impossible to take the cylinder out to clean it.