|
Coffee roaster relies on nickel-containing stainless steel to avoid tainted taste
By Viginia Heffernan
Nickel Magazine, June 2008 -- Nobody wants his double-shot espresso laced
with rust or paint chips. Yet most coffee roasters in North America use painted steel silos that can release
these corrosion products, especially as they age.
The status quo wasn’t good enough for John Rufino, Master Roaster and president of Classic Gourmet Coffee,
one of Canada’s leading specialty coffee roasters. Instead, he designed and built the first coffee plant in
North America to use food-grade austenitic S30400 stainless steel (containing 8% nickel) for its hoppers, silos and any surface that
comes into contact with coffee beans.
“Stainless steel doesn’t react to oil or moisture, and that’s great for coffee,” says Rufino, who has been
roasting coffee for 30 years. “Coffee is like a sponge – it absorbs flavours – so you want your storage to be
as clean and non-porous as possible. Stainless steel provides that.”
Classic Gourmet’s 1,890-square-metre plant has a production capacity of about 450 kilograms per hour and
supplies coffee vendors in central Canada and as far afield as Denmark and South Korea, most of whom operate
their own coffee shops. Classic Gourmet’s main competitive advantage is that it produces consistently good
coffee by using superior beans and roasting methods devised by Rufino and offers education and training to
its customers.
Producing gourmet coffee is a rigorous process that requires hand-picking the fruit, removing the outer
pulp to recover the green beans, roasting the beans to the desired strength and darkness, and blending them
for uniformity. Finally, to make the flavoured coffees that have become popular in recent years, flavourings
such as vanilla or hazelnut may be added.
“The idea is to harness the flavour without damaging the beans,” says Rufino. “That’s what this equipment
is designed to do.”
At the Classic Gourmet plant, green beans are sourced from more than 40 countries and sampled beforehand
for quality control. The chosen beans are then purchased, inventoried and cleaned to rid them of dust and
other debris, then transported by pneumatic tubes to the stainless steel silos where they await roasting. The
beans are roasted at a rate of about 15 minutes per batch, allowed to air cool, then transported to a
separate bank of silos where they await packaging for direct shipment to the customer. To preserve the aroma,
packaging takes place within two hours of roasting in 3-ply aluminum foil bags that have a one-way freshness
valve to allow the beans to de-gas.
While roasting is a critical step in the process that requires the precision and expertise, the way the
coffee is stored – both before and after it is roasted – is also important to the overall quality. By using
only stainless steel in its storage silos, Classic Gourmet avoids the kind of corrosion, and resulting
contamination, that moisture (in green beans) and acidic oils (in roasted beans) can cause.
The self-cleaning vacuum systems that transport the coffee – raw, roasted and ground – throughout the
facility are also made of S30400 stainless, reducing wear and tear on these dynamic parts.
Although the organic coffee grows in popularity, stainless steel’s ability to prevent contamination within
the facility becomes even more important. Rufino estimates that while only about 5% of his current coffee
supply is organic or free trade, this specialty market is growing at a rate of about 15-20% per quarter.
Other plants may be forced to update their equipment or install separate production lines to meet
increasingly stringent standards for organic products.
The design of the Classic Gourmet roaster includes a highly sensitive temperature control system that
allows the beans to roast themselves once a certain temperature is reached and reduces natural gas
consumption and CO2 emissions by as much as 50% compared with conventional roasters.
The gleaming plant on the outskirts of Toronto is the culmination of a lifelong dream for Rufino. His
first business, in the 1970s, was a bakery, and though he was successful, he was never satisfied with the
coffee he was able to purchase to serve to his customers. So he bought his own roaster and started
experimenting with roasts and blends until he achieved the flavour he was seeking.
Eventually, for practical reasons, Rufino sold the bakery to pursue a post-secondary education, then
continued to work as a full-time engineer for several years.
But the coffee bug kept nagging and, to satisfy it, he started roasting part-time again. One weekend, he
ordered in Chinese food and the message inside his fortune cookie read: “You’d do better in your own
business.” He handed in his resignation the following day.
Since then, Rufino’s coffee roasters have grown successively larger as his customer base – including
Toronto’s upscale grocery store Pusateris – has expanded. He now provides about 1,000 customers with a
top-quality product.
Virginia Heffernan is a Toronto-based freelance science
writer.
Photos: Jamie Veeneman for the Nickel Institute.
|
