Carbine Coffee, a startup that wants to make coffee roasting accessible and easy for businesses, came out of stealth mode to introduce its Countertop Roastery at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Seattle. The company offers would-be coffee creators a cloud-connected electric roaster with a small footprint, an accompanying software platform to create specific flavor profiles, and a marketplace for purchasing green coffee beans.
The company is targeting businesses like cafés, bakeries and grocery stores, providing them with what they say will be an out-of-the-box way to roast their own coffee. The machine costs $15,000 and can be purchased outright or leased over time.
The Roastery unit itself is a sleek, white box the size of a small fridge with an LCD temperature readout. With traditional coffee roasters, you need to install proper ventilation to whisk away certain harmful gasses the roasting process creates. Carbine’s Roastery, however, is ventless and uses a catalytic process to remove any harmful gasses without the need for any additional ventilation.
Once fully up and running, Roastery users will browse Carbine’s online marketplace to select and buy green coffee beans from different sources around the world. The software will let them dial in a pre-set flavor profile for those beans and the machine will automatically roast the beans accordingly. Or customers can create their own flavor profile and Carbine will help them create it. The Roastery can roast 1.5 pounds of coffee at a time.
Because the machine is connected to the cloud, Carbine and its customers can remotely monitor the Roastery’s performance. Should a piece starting burning out, or something goes wrong with the implementation of the roast that will affect the taste, Carbine can take proactive measures to correct it.
Carbine wasn’t the only full-stack, ventless coffee roaster on display at the Expo. Just down the row from Carbine, Bellwether coffee showed off its own ventless, customizeable coffee roasting solution.
Based in San Francisco, Carbine Coffee has ten full-time employees and received an undisclosed seed round of funding. The company is signing letters of intent with potential customers and looking to go into trials this fall.
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