Santa Rosa company develops better way to roast coffee

After two tons of coffee roasting machinery arrived from Santa Rosa last winter, Ben Horner was impressed to find that he could assemble the hefty components at an Emeryville warehouse mostly by himself and without any instructions.

Horner is the head roaster of Durham, N.C.-based Counter Culture Coffee. The 20-year-old wholesale specialty coffee company has chosen the Bay Area as the site for its second production facility.

For its Emeryville operation, Counter Culture chose a roaster made in Sonoma County: a Loring Peregrine, a machine known as a “one bagger” because of its ability to roast an entire 70 kilogram (154 pound) bag of green beans. Horner described the Loring as a stainless steel beauty that is thoughtfully designed and produces great coffee while consuming far less energy than traditional roasters.

“They have definitively created the most novel and most interesting innovation in roaster technology in recent history,” he said.

Specialty coffee roasters know Santa Rosa as home to Loring Smart Roast. The Dutton Avenue company is gaining attention as interest continues to grow not only in making craft coffee but also in reducing the greenhouse gases linked to its production.

Both company officials and professional coffee roasters say the Loring models consume far less energy than other machines when dealing with the smoke generated in coffee roasting. Increasingly that smoke must be incinerated in order to meet state and local clean air requirements.

Loring says its machines can consume up to 80 percent less energy than models that use afterburners to remove the smoke - a step that can require far more natural gas than the actual roasting process. That’s just one reason that a coffee company owner last year told the Washington Post that his new Loring was “the Tesla of roasters.”

Loring officials said their customers have won top coffee honors, including at the World Barista Championships. And when high-end Blue Bottle Coffee Co. of Oakland last winter opened its first coffee shop in Japan, it chose to buy and ship over a Loring roaster.

As with wine and beer, coffee keeps trending upscale.

Last year, a third of Americans consumed a daily cup of gourmet coffee, an annual increase of 3 percent, according to the National Coffee Association.

And for the first time, specialty coffee beverages in 2014 surpassed lesser-grade coffee drinks in terms of market share. The specialty cups amounted to 51 percent of the nation’s $48 billion coffee market, according to the Specialty Coffee Association of America.

The specialty association recently completed its first nationwide survey and found the U.S. has about 4,200 commercial roasters.

Along with the domestic market, Loring officials see sales opportunities around the globe, where President/CEO Robert Austin said specialty coffee make up just 20 percent of total sales.

“We do about half of our business internationally,” Austin said.

Loring produced its first roaster a dozen years ago. Officials expect to build upwards of 100 this year, each ranging in price from $80,000 to $210,000. The company employs 35 workers, including various types of engineers, plus welders and fabricators who previously built winery equipment.

How Loring came to be is a story of a bright innovator and a local coffee company whose leaders saw promise in a new roasting method.

Inventing a better roaster

The innovator and company founder, Mark Loring Ludwig, earlier had worked for years helping start up immense processing equipment used by snack food companies. He went on to run a tea-packing business and to sell his own line of coffee in tea bags.

In the mid-1990s, about the time he was teaching himself to weld and use computer-aided design software, Ludwig turned his attention to creating a smokeless coffee roaster without an afterburner.

Today’s roasters, including the top-selling German-made Probat and the American-made Diedrich, typically feature a spinning drum that heats the beans by contact with the metal cylinder. Along with an afterburner, many large models include a “cyclone,” a vertical, upside-down cone used to separate chaff from the bean.

Ludwig instead envisioned a convection roaster using a fixed drum and stirring paddles. Hot air, not hot metal, would roast the beans.

But his challenge was to find a way to use one heat source to do two jobs: Coffee roasting and smoke incineration. His answer was to place the machine’s burner in the cyclone.

To understand this breakthrough, Austin said, it helps to picture a natural whirlwind inside the stainless steel cyclone. When the Loring roaster is operating, he said, “we create a tornado in the middle of this thing.”

Inside, chaff is whipped to the cyclone’s outer walls, where it drops down into a specially fitted barrel for easy disposal. The swirling air is reheated and blown back into the roasting drum, making for a low-oxygen, closed-air system. And through the cyclone’s center, passing through the eye of the mini twister, the burner shoots up a flame approaching 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit that incinerates smoke as it rises to exit via a stack at the top of the container.

Ludwig eventually put his idea down on paper. But coming up with a design was one thing. Building a prototype and starting a company was another.

For help, he turned to Chris Martin, the owner of Sebastopol organic coffee maker Taylor Maid Farms.

Martin eventually agreed to help pull together the needed financing and today remains a major stockholder. For him, the challenge in Ludwig’s idea wasn’t simply in cutting energy use. The roaster also would have to produce great coffee.

“We had some pretty well-known coffee roasting experts who definitely questioned the whole thing,” Martin recalled.

Reducing greenhouse gases

Even so, he said, he deemed the effort worth trying because of the potential to significantly cut the large amount of greenhouse gases created in coffee production. Many coffee companies like to tout how sustainable they are, Martin said, but “we won’t talk about the roasting of the coffee.”

Not surprisingly, Taylor Maid today has a Loring machine at its cafe and roasting warehouse at the Barlow Center in Sebastopol. Ludwig also credited Martin and Mark Inman, then Taylor Maid’s president, for getting other coffee companies in the early years to try the newfangled roaster. It manufactured its first commercial machine in 2003.

“They talked it up,” Ludwig recalled.

These days, lots of coffee roasters talk it up.

In Post Falls, Idaho, Doma Coffee Roasting in 2007 purchased the 13th roaster to be made by Loring. Doma turned to its local utility to do a case study on how much energy the new roaster would save compared to the old model it was replacing.

“We found that we actually did save 80 percent,” said head roaster Jim Hottenroth.

A ‘huge’ energy savings

At the year-old Compass Coffee in Washington, D.C., lead roaster Brandon Warner expressed satisfaction with both the quality of coffee produced and the energy saved with a mid-size Loring model, the Kestrel, which is able to roast half a bag of coffee at a time.

“It has cost less to run our Loring Kestrel than some of our employees pay to heat their houses,” Warner wrote in an email. “That is a huge savings for a small business.”

In the past, the main gauge for the roasting process was the coffee “tryer,” a specially shaped scoop on a wooden handle that allows the roaster to pull out and inspect beans from the spinning drum. But the Loring adds to that two computers and a touch screen.

Head roasters said the high-tech operation allows them to measure and capture data so they can fine-tune the roasting process, both for particular beans and for different types of roasts.

“When we do a roast that we really like, we can repeat it every single time,” Hottenroth said.

Ludwig said he chose to use his middle name, Loring, for the company because, when it comes to coffee, “everything has been taken.” That included the name “Ludwig.”

For him, his company’s timing is perfect. The global effort to reduce air pollution and greenhouse gases will keep coffee roasters looking at his machines. And the world’s coffee drinkers will keep looking for a better cup of joe and finding it in specialty coffee.

“It’s just so much more than what your folks spent their lives drinking,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Robert Digitale at 521-5285 or robert.digitale@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @rdigit