Bendig Maquinaria S.A.

History

The firm does not bear its founder's name. It was born in 1954 from the effort of Gustavo Haeberle, with a declared aim: to develop industrial machinery for coffee processing. In 1974, Rodolfo Bendig Müller took over the management. He continued developing the machines and opened exports. It is his name that remains on the sign. Between 1980 and 1982, his sons Hugo and Rodolfo joined him. The business became a joint-stock company in 1986. Roasting came late, and that is the second fact to retain. The Tostamat TT-120 was launched in 1988, thirty-four years after the founding. The bulk of the catalog is elsewhere, in wet processing, the kind that separates the pulp from the fruit and washes the bean: pulpers, separators, washers, dryers. To these are added hullers, which remove from the dry bean its parchment, that paper envelope stuck to it. In November 1999, the firm declared seventy-two employees, including a five-person design office with two engineers. It then exported more than seventy percent of its production, which explains why it published its site in English before publishing it in Spanish. Rodolfo Bendig appears there as production manager. The engineer Rodolfo Bendig González now chairs the company and ensures its general management.

What it makes

It designs, builds and installs by itself, in its own workshop of more than two thousand five hundred square meters under cover. The whole coffee chain passes through it, from the pulper to the mill, more than a hundred different pieces of equipment according to the firm. On roasting, the principle is not the same from one line to another. For the Tostamat TT line, the manufacturer writes that roasting is done by airflow. For the TT-80 and TT-120, it says so in so many words: heat delivery by convection. Convection is the transport of heat by a moving fluid, here air heated with liquefied petroleum gas. It is therefore not the flame that touches the drum, but the air it has heated. For the TD, TE and TAC lines, nothing of the kind is written. The small ECO works differently: electric resistances or a gas burner heat its roasting chamber. The parts in contact with the bean are given as stainless steel, cooler included. A cyclone separates the chaff and the fumes: it is a chamber where the air spins and deposits what it carries. The TT-80 and TT-120 carry two. The burner of the TT-5 and that of the TD line are certified by Underwriters Laboratories, the American safety testing organization. The English site of 1998 already gave the Tostamat burners as UL listed, which matters because the firm exports.

The models

The model number gives the load in kilos per batch. Laboratory: the TP-2, two cylinders of 120 grams of green coffee each, mounted on a wooden board. The manufacturer also announces a three-cylinder version, which it does not name. The ECO 500 goes from 120 to 2,000 grams according to its roasting table. Countertop and small roasting: the TE line, of which a TE-12 appears in a customer testimonial. Then come the TAC-5 and the Tostamat TT-5, both given as 2 to 5.5 kilos. Production: the TD-10, from 10 to 15 kilos per batch, or 40 to 60 kilos per hour. Then the TD-30, TD-60 and TD-100. On the Tostamat side: the TT-20, given at 120 pounds per hour, then the TT-45, TT-80, TT-120 and TT-180. The TT-120 was the first model launched on the market, in 1988. The English site of 1998 displayed five Tostamat sizes: 5, 15, 30, 80 and 120 kilos per batch. The TT-15 has since disappeared from the catalog. To these is added the TNT-120, an installation for sugar-roasted coffee, where the sugar caramelizes on the bean during roasting. The firm also lists a cocoa roaster, with an oven and a crusher for the same bean. Finally, it builds complete installations of 40 to 400 kilos per hour. It builds them around a TD-10, a TT-20, a TT-45, a TT-80 or a TT-120.

What you gain

On the Tostamat line, heat passes through the air, not through the sheet metal. A direct-flame drum first roasts the beans that touch the wall. Here the hot air passes through the whole mass, so the gap between the bean at the edge and the one at the center narrows. The announced times point the same way. At equal load, from 2 to 5.5 kilos, the Tostamat TT-5 requires 10 to 12 minutes. The TAC-5, which the manufacturer does not give as an airflow roast, requires 25 to 30. The cooler of the TT-20 brings the batch back to cold in four minutes, so roasting stops quickly instead of continuing in the pile. The stainless steel in contact with the bean rules out any mill scale, that crust of oxide that forms on heated steel, from coming off into the batch.

What you lose

The air has its own inertia. It must be heated before it heats the bean, so a burner correction arrives later than on a direct-flame drum. The only measuring point the manufacturer names is the gas temperature, on the TD-10. Elsewhere it writes thermometer or digital thermoregulator, without saying what the instrument measures. No bean-mass probe or curve recording is documented, so repeatability rests on the operator. The manufacturer publishes neither footprint, nor gas consumption, nor airflow, so a workshop project cannot be sized from its pages. Finally, the 5 horsepower of the TD-10 on single-phase 110 volts draw more than thirty amps, hence a dedicated circuit.