Pinhalense

History

Six partners founded the company in 1950 in Espírito Santo do Pinhal, in the State of São Paulo. The manufacturer names them: Dimas Cipolli, Guerino Del Guerra, Lourenço Del Guerra, Mauro Del Guerra, Ovídio Piagentini and Waldomiro Casemiro Teixeira. The first machines were wooden hullers. The region produces coffee, and before anything else the bean has to be separated from its husk. Next came the catador de pedra, literally stone picker, which removes stones from the lot before they break the machines downstream. Then the size classifier and the sorter. The trade has not changed since: it is green coffee, from cherry to bag. In 2017 the company handled seven crops, from coffee to pepper and macadamia nuts. In 2026 it announces more than ten, with seventy-six years of existence, more than eight hundred employees and a presence in more than one hundred countries. The trade press counted for it in 2017 about 710 employees and three plants totaling more than 60,000 square meters, all in Espírito Santo do Pinhal. It also counted more than twenty-five patents for it, covering the processing stages, from receiving to export. None concerns roasting. Yet between 2017 and 2019, Pinhalense did put two roasting machines in its catalog, the TL2 and the TLFGI. They were shown three years in a row at the International Coffee Week, at the Expominas in Belo Horizonte. The TL2 was the prize of the Aroma BSCA competition, wet process category, that of coffees pulped with water. It was presented on November 27, 2017 to José Renato Gonçalves Dias, of Fazenda Sertãozinho in Botelhos, in Minas Gerais. This producer had won both categories of the competition, wet process and naturals. Both roasters have since disappeared from the catalog.

What it makes

Pinhalense's business is the processing of green coffee: hullers, pulpers, washers, dryers, furnaces, gravity tables, classifiers and sorters. Roasting is not part of it, and that is what makes its two roasters interesting. The TLFGI heats by fluid bed. A fluid bed is a rising column of hot air strong enough to lift the beans: the charge then behaves like a boiling liquid. Heat therefore passes almost entirely by convection, that is, by moving air, and not by contact with hot metal. The vessel is stainless steel and the burner gas. The manufacturer credits it with homogeneous roasting, a low noise level, automatic cooling and minimal smoke emission. The TL2, for its part, is described by the manufacturer as a gas laboratory roaster. The announced list is long. Automatic flame ignition with safety system, gas pressure gauge, probe plunged directly into the bean mass and not into the air. Independent controls for flame, temperature and airflow, electronic timer with alarm, diode flame indicator. Finally a smoke and chaff collector, those thin skins that detach from the bean during roasting, and rapid cooling. The TL2's heating principle is published nowhere: neither drum, nor fluid bed, nor recirculated air is ever named.

The models

Two roasters, and no published capacity per batch. The TLFGI, a fluid bed roaster, stainless steel and gas-fired, is named from the October 2017 press release. The TL2, a gas laboratory roaster, is described there in detail but not named. Its acronym appears only in November 2017, in the trade press, on the occasion of the Aroma BSCA competition. Both machines return to the International Coffee Week in November 2018, then in November 2019, with the ML grinder. The only figure the press has repeated, one kilo of roasted coffee for 1.2 kilos of green, concerns the TLFGI. It is not a capacity but a yield. It says that roasting loses about 16.7 percent of the mass, which corresponds to a medium roast, and says nothing about the volume of the vessel. The manufacturer's data sheet, whose file was called TLFGI-5, is no longer online and returns a 404 error. Alongside the two machines came a laboratory grinder, the ML. It weighs 17 kilos, runs on dual voltage and grinds with discs. Internal hopper, stainless steel cleaning drawer, grind adjustment and a lever to purge residues complete the list. The manufacturer called the three its laboratory line, intended for laboratories, cafeterias and small roasteries. None of the three appears in the 2026 catalog, which now lists only green coffee equipment.

What you gain

The fluid bed removes the hot wall. Tipping and surface scorching come from too hot a contact with the metal: without this wall, the cause disappears. Each bean bathes in the same air, so roasting is even from one bean to the next. The air carries off the chaff as it comes, before it burns on a hot wall. That is one source of smoke fewer, and the manufacturer does indeed announce minimal emission. Convection responds quickly, and an airflow correction shows within seconds. The announced yield for the TLFGI, one kilo for 1.2, confirms a roast carried through and not a simple drying. On the TL2, the probe plunges into the mass: it reads what is roasting, not the burner's air.

What you lose

A fluid bed works within a narrow window. Too much air and the beans leave the bed, too little and they fall back to the bottom. A partial charge therefore becomes difficult, where a drum absorbs it. Above all, the profile does not transpose. A production drum roasts in good part by conduction, the bean touching the hot metal, and it does not react like a column of air. What has been set on the TLFGI therefore has to be redone on the production machine. No capacity per batch is published for these two machines, nor burner power, nor airflow: they cannot be compared to anything. Finally, they have left the catalog: buying used means buying without guaranteed parts.