Palini & Alves (Palinialves)
Sample roasters, Espírito Santo do Pinhal, São Paulo State, Brazil.
History
The company does not come from roasting. It comes from green coffee. Carlos Roberto Palini and Flávio Pereira Alves were born in Jacutinga, in southern Minas Gerais. They grew up among the fazendas and coffee warehouses of that region. What these neighbors asked for first was not new machines, it was repairs. The Brazilian federal registry records the company on February 22, 1979, under the corporate name Palini & Alves Ltda. The company itself dates its start to March 1979: two partners, three employees, a small shed near the town center. There they made spare parts and small machines, and they repaired existing equipment. They bought a building of their own, of 600 square meters, in 1982. That year they moved into beneficio and rebeneficio machines. The first word designates the hulling of the bean, the second its cleaning and sorting by the dry method. That is, a pre-cleaner, a stone separator, a Porto classifier and a gravity table. In the mid-1990s, the city hall of Espírito Santo do Pinhal gave them a plot of 12,500 square meters, 4,000 of them built on. Later, the company had 250 employees and supplied the large green coffee exporters. The sample roaster arrived through this door, and not through the roaster's. Whoever buys and sells green must roast it to grade it. In July 2022, the four partners listed in the registry are all of the second generation, one Palini and three Alves. The trademark joins the two surnames into a single word, Palinialves. The registry keeps the ampersand.
What it makes
The PA-TPROVA is not a machine, it is a bench. A row of small metal cylinders turns over a gas heater, one cylinder per mouth, from one to six mouths. A single 1/3 horsepower single-phase electric motor drives the whole row. It goes through a worm and a ring gear. This is a slow, quiet reducer, which holds the speed constant without electronics. That explains why no variable drive appears in the catalog: speed is not a setting, it is a given of the assembly. The bean therefore takes most of its heat from contact with the hot wall, by conduction. This is not the hot airflow of a fluid bed sample roaster, where the bean is carried by the air. A thermometer equips the bench. A grinder is coupled on the same frame, with its male burr and female burr, the two names the company gives to the parts that fit together. It avoids carrying the sample to another device before tasting. The batch drops into a bandeja, a metal tray, where it cools in open air. The company's two 4 kg home roasters rest on the same principle, worm and 35-tooth bronze ring gear. Their parts, however, carry other references than those of the sample bench.
The models
Six versions of a single sample machine: PA-TPROVA/1T to PA-TPROVA/6T, depending on the number of mouths. Each mouth roasts 300 g of green coffee, or 1.8 kg for the six-mouth model. The motor stays the same on all six, 1/3 horsepower single-phase, since it drives only one common shaft. The product sheet states gas heating, the Conjunto para Prova de Café leaflet offers gas or electric. This machine, moreover, is rarely sold alone. It is part of a grading set, sold as a block because grading always follows the same steps. It includes two sample huller units. The PA-AMO/300 handles 300 g per charge, the PA-AMO/30 gets through 30 kg per hour. Then come screen-grading sieves with a wooden frame and a grading table, also wooden, with its lamp and its bench. Added to these are a rotating tasting table with a white marble top, conical trays, a swivel stool and a stainless steel spittoon. Alongside, two 4 kg roasters belong to the family of tabletop machines. The PA-TORR/04M carries a grinder and a manual cooler, with a 1/2 horsepower motor and gas heating. The PA-TORR/04SM goes without a grinder, with a 1/4 horsepower motor.
What you gain
Six mouths on a single shaft means six lots roasted side by side. Same bench, same speed, same day. Comparing lots, the very trade of the green coffee buyer, is thus done without a stray variable. The 300 g charge is large for a sample machine. It provides enough to taste and enough to put through the sieve, from a single batch. Its mass also dampens a brief variation of the heating, because a heavier pile takes longer to change temperature. Finally, the path of the heat, a hot metal wall, is that of a production drum. The profile mismatch that convection machines suffer from is thereby reduced.
What you lose
No probe in the bean mass is documented, nor any recording, nor even the position of the thermometer. One can therefore neither redo a profile the next day nor compare it with another laboratory. Control comes down to the gas valve and the operator's eye. The PA-TPROVA parts list counts only one stainless steel cup. The sampling spoon does not appear in it, it is listed only for the 4 kg roasters. This ranks a roast, it does not measure it. Cooling takes place in open air, in a tray, with no fan announced. These 300 g therefore keep cooking after leaving the drum, and the stopping point drifts. Rotation speed is not a variable: the same single motor serves from one mouth to six.