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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

coffee roaster

Bellwether Debuts Small-Format, Countertop Electric Coffee Roaster for $15 Thousand

Today Bellwether Coffee announced its latest electric, ventless coffee roasting machine, The Bellwether Shop Roaster. The new roaster, which is the company’s third-generation electric roasting machine, will retail starting at $14,900, about one-quarter of the price of its second-generation roasting appliance.

According to the company, the Shop Roaster will be able to roast 3.3 pounds of coffee in about 15-20 minutes, meaning a throughput of up to 13 pounds of coffee per hour. As part of its new product lineup Bellwether will also offer a continuous roasting upgrade to the Shop Roaster for $5,000 extra ($19,900 for upgrade and the Shop Roaster). The continuous roasting upgrade will enable the auto-loading of green, unroasted beans into the coffee roaster, enabling up to 13 continuous roasts or 44 pounds of coffee before refilling the base with unroasted coffee beans.

We’ve been following Bellwether since the early days here at the Spoon when they were one of the early roasting infrastructure players pushing the industry towards electrification and decentralized roasting. While some of the bigger players in roasting, like Probat, have started to offer electric roasters, Whiel some players like Carbine have gone out of business, Bellwether continues to push the envelope on size and could attract even more coffee shops and retailers to experiment with roasting their own beans.

aria coffee roaster

This New Kind Of Coffee Roaster Goes From Room-Temp To 700° In 3 Seconds

Inventor Glen Poss isn’t afraid to rustle some feathers. In fact, he’s betting on it. For nearly 20 years he’s been dreaming up a new way to roast coffee that eliminates the need for coffee sourcing trips, big roasting gear, and even roasting training—three things that coffee industry giants point at to demonstrate top-dogness.

He believes he’s on the cusp of decentralizing the coffee roasting industry with his 20-years-in-the-making invention: The Aria Coffee Roaster. Naturally, we hopped on a call to see what the Aria’s all about.

The idea came to Glen back in 1999 when his friend let him borrow a small home coffee roasting device: “I spun the little machine up, it smoked like crazy, the chaff caught on fire, and it was as noisy as a vacuum cleaner. The machine was s***, but I realized the market and business looked pretty good.”

Glen spent years exploring ways to make coffee roasting accessible to the consumer. He knew if he wanted to enable mass adoption, it couldn’t be a device for hobbyists. It had to be as simple as an appliance. “It can’t be about being an artisan. It’s about getting the customer what they want, in their pajamas, while they’re hungover. It has to be easy as toast.”

He claims he invented three new ways to roast coffee—two of which wouldn’t ever work in a consumer environment. But the third way, which Glen’s not ready fully disclose, is truly novel. “Say it’s ‘zero airflow’ roasting,” he said. “No smoke, no odor, steam, takes less than ten minutes—if they can guess how we do it, I want them to come work for me.”

We can say, however, what the result is: a countertop roaster that can go from room temperature to 700 degrees Fahrenheit in just 3 seconds. There’s no smoke, no odor, and no oxygen in the roasting chamber, which means there’s no risk of the thin chaff catching fire. The single-cell consumer model is expected to retail at $199.

How The Aria Coffee Roaster Works

At first glance, the Aria doesn’t seem to depart from the typical roasting routine: consumers pull out a pouch of pre-portioned green coffee beans sourced and delivered by Aria, scan the RFID chip and select one of the four suggested roast profiles (much like the Bonaverde, or the Kelvin), put the beans in the device, shut the door, and press start.

When the roast is complete, somewhere between four and ten minutes later, cold water is pumped around the roasting chamber, instantly cooling it to a safe 150 degrees.

But here’s where things aren’t so normal. The four recommended roast profiles for each bean include three standard profiles—light, medium, and dark—but also one that completely defies the conventional wisdom of coffee roasting: ‘high delta’.

Glen wanted to recreate the coffee roasting process involved in the Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Rather than being a single roast level from surface to center, these coffees are more like a rare steak, featuring varying roast levels within a single bean and leading to an unusually complex flavor experience (though many will argue this introduces imbalance).

But Glen didn’t want to stop at four options. Consumers can decline the suggested profiles and choose any one of nearly 100 roast profiles that are loaded onto the machine at any point.

There’s also an app that lets the more experimental home roasters take full control over their roast profiles—but there’s a catch: they’ll instantly void the warranty of their machine.

“The app’s a use at your own risk kind of thing,” Glen explained. “If someone wants to try roasting an empty cartridge at 700 degrees for ten minutes and melt the steel, well, that’s on them. We have no control with the app, so there’s no warranty.”

Dreaming Of Disruption In The Coffee Industry

Glen touched on something we’ve written a lot about at The Spoon: the democratization of coffee roasting. By building a commercial model of the Aria, he intends to take roasting away from remote facilities and put it directly in the hands of baristas and cafes.

“Roasting facilities cost a lot of money, labor, and time. Then you have to ship out the beans everywhere,” Glen said. “With our tech, whether it’s in cafes, restaurants, or at home, you don’t need to raise any money or get permits. That’s how we disrupt coffee: we decentralize it.”

But Glen’s not the only one trying to beat the hub-and-spoke model. Bellwether Coffee, whose zero-emission coffee roasters require no permit or ventilation to operate, is already giving the power of on-site roasting to cafes around the country.

Glen’s approach, however, is quite different from Bellwether’s. The Aria roaster is “based on the idea of a multi-engine craft: you can run as many or as little as you need, and if one ‘cell’ dies, you have backups so you never ‘crash’.”

The 4-cell commercial Aria model will enable everyday baristas to roast coffee for customers on demand, with an output of up to 7.5 pounds of roasted coffee per hour.

Once again, this flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which says that coffee needs at least 24 hours to “degas” before it’s ready to be brewed for maximum flavor and balance. Glen isn’t worried, however, because he claims the technology is so different that it enables coffee to be roasted, brewed, and enjoyed within minutes of each other without sacrificing quality.

Glen and his team are actively seeking a CEO who can take the Aria Coffee Roaster to investors, then to market in the next few years.

home coffee roaster

Home Coffee Roasting Gear Is Booming, But Will It Last?

We’ve seen espresso machines sized down to fit home kitchens. We’ve seen pour over cones transition from a snooty barista tool to home coffee bar essential. And now, it seems, coffee roasting is undergoing a similar adaptation.

Home coffee roasters have existed for years, with Behmor, Hottop, and Gene Cafe leading the space (behind Grandma’s repurposed popcorn popper, of course), but a new wave of home roasting gear is making waves—and raising lots of money.

Back in 2013, over 2,000 backers raised $600,000 to bring the Bonaverde Berlin—an $800 home roaster and coffee maker combo device—to life (you can read our review here).In 2015, London-based Ikawa raised just over $200,000 to bring its app-controlled roaster to prosumer homes. The device pre-sold for $650, was released in 2017, and now sells for just over $1,000 at retail.

And more recently in 2018, IA Collaborative Ventures’ Kelvin raised $400,000 to make coffee roasting even simpler and more affordable for casual coffee lovers, with devices pre-sold for just $250. A few weeks later, the Singaporean Power Roaster raised another $50,000 with roasters for $280 a pop.

For those of us in the coffee industry, this home roasting gear boom is a bit surprising. Roasting coffee is far more complex than most consumers imagine. Getting hold of high-quality unroasted beans can be a challenge. After roasting the beans, you have to wait days for the beans to release carbon dioxide before they even taste good. And when you finally get a great flavor profile you’re proud of, it’s hard to produce a second time.

Can home roasters engage casual coffee lovers enough to make the growth we’re seeing sustainable, or is this another fad that consumers will grow tired of once they’re confronted with the hidden complexities of coffee roasting?

I interviewed Alex Georgiou, Ikawa’s Head of Marketing, to discuss how he sees this niche market evolving over the next few years.

“The global home roasting audience is all in different places,” he pointed out. Taiwan has a well-developed tradition of home roasting with low-tech tools. Europe’s traditional cafes still maintain the monopoly on coffee beans. And America has “really deep pockets of home roasting enthusiasts.”

ikawa coffee roaster

But even in parts of the world where exploring new kinds of coffee experiences is commonplace, Alex admits that home roasters are still a very niche audience, largely because the equipment isn’t very intuitive. “For a lot of people it’s a little bit like wrestling with a vacuum cleaner in your garage. It’s hard to do well and it’s not really an enjoyable process.”

To combat this challenge, Ikawa ships six bags of green coffee beans with every Ikawa At Home roaster. When users open the app and pick a bean to start roasting, they then can choose from six roast profile options—each highlighting different flavors and aromas. “Even if you’ve never roasted coffee before, you’ll be able to get great results, and then you can explore that going forward.”

This eliminates the friction of sourcing green coffee and figuring out how to roast for the first time, but is it enough to get casual coffee lovers on board? At just over $1,000 for the Ikawa At Home, many in the industry have voiced concern that it’s priced too high to open the home roasting floodgates.

I also reached out to Dan Kraemer, Founder and Chief Design Officer at IA Collaborative and creator of the Kelvin roaster, to get a different perspective. Like Alex, Dan sees accessibility as the key to enabling demand for home roasting gear to grow.

“Consumers just need to know it’s an option,” Dan said when I asked what it’s going to take for roasting to go mainstream. “The complete roaster and green bean delivery solution we offer through Kelvin will make home coffee roasting super easy and accessible.”

The Kelvin is priced at just $249 for pre-orders and will be around $330 after devices ship this Spring—a significantly more affordable option for aspiring home roasters. Rather than allowing consumers to control every aspect of their roast profile via an app like the Ikawa At Home, Kelvin users simply turn a single dial on the device to set their roast time.

“You can create myriad combinations of flavors and profiles just by varying the amount of time that you roast the coffee,” Dan said. “It’s a very simple entry-point for people who’ve never roasted before.”

The standard Kelvin Starter Pack will ship with a single pound of green coffee, but most pre-order customers actually opted to order three to six pounds of coffee. Dan is confident that most Kelvin users will continue to use the Kelvin app to source coffees that are tailored to their taste and brewing preferences once they’ve gone through their initial bags.

kelvin coffee roaster

Ikawa and Kelvin tackle the issue of home roasting differently, but there’s one belief they both share: fanatics are always finding new ways to explore the world of coffee, and roasting at home is the natural next step for millions of people around the world—they just need the right accessible equipment to start this next segment of their coffee journey.

We’re still in the early days of home roasting, and at this point, it’s hard to tell whether it’ll remain an activity for super-enthusiasts or if consumer-centric devices like the Ikawa At Home and Kelvin will be able to capture the attention of more casual coffee lovers.

Bellwether Unveils its Ventless, Electric Coffee Roaster for Cafés

Bellwether unveiled what it says is the first commercially available ventless, electric coffee roaster to the public this weekend at the Specialty Coffee Expo in Seattle. Aimed at cafés, the cloud-connected roaster is roughly the size of a vending machine and can roast seven pounds of green coffee to specific flavor specifications in ten minutes.

The fact that the roaster is electric and ventless is a big deal, according to Bellwether CEO, Nathan Gilliland. Traditionally, roasting coffee emits harmful gasses and requires special ventilation to be installed, which requires permits and is expensive. Bellwether uses a catalytic process to eliminate those gasses and the need for extra ventilation.

Basically, Bellwether provides a complete roasting solution in a box for a coffee shop. With the accompanying iPad, owners can order green beans from different sources, select from pre-set flavor profiles (or customize their own) and simply press a button. Bellwether does the rest to ensure that the roast is correct and consistent every time.

Bellwether Founder, Ricardo Lopez told me one thing most people don’t often realize is that once roasted, different coffee bean types need to rest and off-gas for different periods of time. A certain type may be best 4 days after roasting, for example. Bellwether knows this and will help you schedule accordingly so you are roasting, resting and serving the coffee at its best.

With this consistency, Gilliland said Bellwether becomes a good option for coffee shops that want to expand to new locations. Rather than shipping beans around, branches can install the relatively small Bellwethers at each location. Because all the machines are connected to the cloud, each remote machine can use the exact same beans and flavor profile to ensure that coffee tastes the exact same at each location.

Bellwether is also packed with sensors that can detect any anomalies with the roast process or sense if a part is failing and alert Bellwether, which can troubleshoot the problem.

A Bellwether machine costs $1,000 a month to rent, which includes $200 worth of green coffee, as well as all the service and software.

If all this sounds familiar, that means you’re an avid reader of The Spoon, as we just wrote about Carbine Coffee’s Countertop Roastery, which also debuted its own ventless electric coffee roaster at the Expo. But there are some big differences between the two, including the bigness. Bellwether’s machine is larger and can roast more coffee at a time (Gilliland says that if pushed it can produce 300 pounds a day). Additionally, from my chats with each company, Bellwether seems further along, as its software was on display and they are actively taking orders for fulfillment this fall.

Between Bellwether and Carbine, however, it seems like we’re on the cusp of craft coffee taking off like craft beer did. The ability to stick a Bellwether in just about any location without the need for building out ventilation, plus the capability to dial in a very specific roast to your taste means more coffee shops (and bakeries, and grocery stores) can create and sell their own signature blends. It’s like B2B coffee for the SMB market.

Founded in 2014, Bellwether is based in the Bay Area, has 15 employees and has raised $8 million in venture funding. Check out a video of the Bellwether in action below.

Bellwether's Ventless, Electric Coffee Bean Roaster from The Spoon on Vimeo.