Sonofresco

History

The company was born of a coffee outage. In the winter of 1996, a storm dumped three feet of snow, about ninety centimeters, in a single day on Samish Island. This spit of land set in Puget Sound found itself cut off from town, and the Stapletons had no coffee. Syd Stapleton then pan-roasted a pound of green beans bought out of curiosity on the coast of Mexico. The result seemed better to him than the whole-bean coffee at ten or twelve dollars a pound that he usually bought. His neighbor Jerry Whitfield joined him. Whitfield holds a doctorate in combustion engineering and invented the pellet stove: he therefore knew how to dose a flame. Stapleton is a mechanical draftsman and former toolmaker, the trade that makes tools and molds. They began with a heat gun, bought a used milling machine and borrowed a lathe from a neighboring shipyard in Anacortes. Two years of prototypes followed, in the evenings and on weekends, in the farm workshop. The restaurateurs they consulted most often raised the same objection: no time to learn or teach one more trade. Hence the bias toward a fully automatic machine, entrusted to electronics rather than to a craftsman. Coffee Kinetics sold it from 2000 under the name Syd & Jerry's. The name became sonofresco between September 25 and November 6, 2002, from the Italian sono fresco, I am fresh. The company then added green coffee, with blends developed with the author Kenneth Davids, to sell the raw material to its customers as well. On June 23, 2016, the listed group Coffee Holding Company created a subsidiary, Sonofresco LLC, a Delaware company. On June 29 it bought the assets of Coffee Kinetics LLC, a Washington company, for 819,564 dollars and 38,364 shares. All of the seller's staff moved to the buyer, and the Burlington workshop kept running.

What it makes

Fluidized bed, or air roaster. A column of hot air lifts and stirs the beans in a glass-ceramic chamber. Heat therefore passes by convection, that is, carried by a moving fluid. A production drum, by contrast, heats mainly by conduction, through contact of the bean with the hot sheet metal. The heat comes from a gas burner, propane or natural gas. The manuals give an output per model and per gas, in BTU per hour, the Anglo-Saxon unit of heat. The small machine develops 31,000 BTU on propane and 37,000 on natural gas. The large one develops 45,000 on propane and 48,000 on natural gas. The gas is fixed at the time of order and no conversion is possible without a dedicated kit, under pain of accident. Electricity serves only the blower and the controls. Depending on the country, it is 120 volts, 3 amps, 360 watts, or 230 volts, 1.5 amps, 345 watts. The manufacturer gives two reasons for its refusal of the electric resistance heater. First, the microprocessor modulates the gas in pulses, which holds the rate of rise. Second, the burner's low thermal inertia allows cooling almost immediately once roasting ends. The end of roasting is decided by the temperature reached, not by a timer: the result therefore repeats from one batch to the next. Integrated collection of chaff, the fine skin that comes off the bean during roasting. Installed indoors, the machine must be connected to a duct to the outside. Above 4,500 feet of altitude, or 1,370 meters, the manufacturer asks to be informed so as to adapt the burner to thinner air. Machines assembled to order, UL and CSA listed to ANSI Z83.11b and CGA 1.8b standards.

The models

A single appliance, the Profile Coffee Roaster, in two sizes. The small one, reference CR1S, accepts from 120 g to 1.4 pounds of green, or 635 g. It therefore also serves as a sample roaster, the machine that roasts a small dose to taste a lot before buying it. A flap then reduces the airflow, without which 120 g will not stay in suspension. The large one, reference CR2, works at a fixed volume, about 2.8 pounds of green, or 1.27 kg. It has no sample position. Announced cycle of eighteen minutes, cooling included: about eleven minutes of roasting, then seven of cooling. Three finishes: black, red, stainless steel. The original control offers a single setting, the roast degree from 0 to 9. Each step is worth 3.5 °C of end temperature, from 193 °C at step 0 to 224.5 °C at step 9. These temperatures are preprogrammed and the user cannot change them. The Advanced Definition Roasting software lifts this limit. It is sold as an option, from 250 to 450 dollars, and is not needed for normal operation. The ADR board keeps six profiles, A to F: A is the factory profile, B to F are drawn on a computer and transferred by Bluetooth. Machines of model year 2014 and later accept it directly, older ones require a conversion kit.

What you gain

In a fluidized bed, no bean rests on a hot wall. The risk of a scorched side disappears and the batch heats evenly. A drum gets this only at the price of fine adjustment, since part of the beans constantly rub against the sheet metal. The gas burner's low inertia stops the heating within seconds. The same blower then becomes the cooling fan, which avoids adding a tray and its motor. Cooling takes about seven minutes of the eighteen-minute cycle. The end driven by temperature, and not by time, makes the result reproducible despite the room temperature. This is what allows the machine to be entrusted to someone who is not a roaster, which was the original aim. On the small machine, the sampling flap lets you taste 120 g before committing a full batch, on the same appliance and therefore in the same air regime.

What you lose

The roaster has almost no hand during roasting. Without the software, there is only a factory profile and ten end steps. With the software, he draws the curve beforehand: the manual provides only for creating, editing, tracking and transferring profiles. To stop a batch that is darkening too fast, you cut the gas, and the machine goes straight into its cooling. This is the opposite of a manual drum, where the flame is corrected in the middle of the climb. The gas and the duct rule out treating the appliance as ordinary countertop equipment. A gas line, an exhaust to the outside and local compliance are needed. The sampling flap is easy to set wrongly. At full load in sample position, the air runs short, and the manual warns of a risk of bean fire in the chamber. The manual also asks that the machine not be left running unattended, which tempers the promise of automation. Finally, the resulting profile, strongly convective, cannot be transposed as is onto a production drum.