Leister heating technology for perfect coffee pleasure

Author: Martin Sailer, General Manager, Leister International AG

Simply excellent coffee

When Dan Fitzsimmons talks about coffee, it quickly becomes apparent how little people know about their favorite drink – whether it’s the beans or the brewing process, and certainly the complex intricacies of the roasting process. But the coffee expert doesn’t want to convince anyone. “There are no dogmas about coffee. The best coffee is the one that tastes best.”

Anyone who visits him in his cafe “The Coffee Roaster” in Sydney, Australia, will get an immediate sense of his passion for the essentials: Simply excellent coffee.

The art of engineering meets the art of coffee

However, Dan is not just a barista. First and foremost, he is an engineer and computer scientist who has spent the last 33 years developing excellent coffee roasting machines – from small store roasters to huge industrial machines that resemble a small house and are equipped with automatic mixing systems and high-quality process control.

The heart of the Piccolo roaster and the entire technology is the especially developed roasting chamber: Heated compressed air flows from below into a narrow, rectangular funnel with one slanting and three vertical walls. The beans are roasted homogeneously in this fluidized bed process, meaning that each bean is evenly surrounded by heat. The actual temperature of the beans is measured precisely on the slanting chamber wall without being affected by the hot air.

Various roasting profiles for individual tastes

“With this system, we can create dozens of different roasting profiles – far more than most machine manufacturers, simply because we’re aware of the actual temperature of the beans at all times,” explains Dan. This allows him to adapt the roasting process to beans from all around the world and to the respective brewing process.

Filter coffee, for example, needs to be roasted more gently so as to preserve the fruity aromas that are extracted when hot water is added. Espresso lovers, on the other hand, prefer a more intense roast where the sugar in the beans caramelizes. Dan controls all of this in real time at a terminal next to the roasting machine.

Precise parameter settings

A secondary effect of the fluidized bed process is that the husks of the coffee beans are quickly and fully transported into the machine's outlet. Compared to the residues of many other machines, where the skins are not removed to the same extent, Dan's residues appear clean and intact. “Even a small amount of burnt skins around the beans leaves a bad coffee taste. With our process we can avoid this,” says Dan.

LHS 61 – the heart of the roaster

“When I was looking for a possible heat source for the new design of the small coffee roasters in 2003, I discovered the Leister LH 61 system and was quickly impressed by how precisely I could use it to dose the heat,” says Dan about the heart of his Piccolo roaster. Since then, Plastral Pty Ltd, Leister's distributor in Australia, has supplied a large number of these devices for Dan's coffee roasters, which are now in use at various locations around the world – including on the west coast of the USA, where the inspiration for the name of Dan’s Piccolo roasting system comes from: the Chinook weather system, a warm Foehn wind that occurs in Corvallis, Oregon, where the inventor of the original air coffee roaster lived.

Thanks to Leister’s precise heating technology and the innovative design of the Piccolo roaster, customers can enjoy perfectly matched roasting profiles for every coffee taste. This is how every coffee becomes the perfect taste experience – individual, high-quality and consistent.

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