Almost instant coffee: Torftech's new coffee roaster.

Almost instant coffee: Torftech's new coffee roaster

Reading, in the Royal County of Berkshire, England, does not acquit itself well in the early chapters of Jerome K. Jerome's famous book "Three Men In A Boat." He describes it as "good natured enough to keep its ugly face a good deal out of site of the River Thames." A little unkind, maybe, but largely true, though the ugly face has become a very profitable one over the decades since Jerome's time.

One of the more recent companies to set up shop there is Torftech, and they appear to have hit upon a winner with their revolutionary new coffee roaster.

The Torbed 400 Roaster was originally concived in 1985 as a solution to the problem of faster heat transfer of minerals in a fluidized bed. It is generally recognized that this system represents a quantum leap in this technology and therefore deserves serious consideration by the coffee industry.

The whole idea was the brainchild of Christopher Dodson the managing director of Torftech. He told Tea & Coffee Trade Journal that the concept of the "toroidal bed" comes from two rather polarized objects - a ring doughnut and a hovercraft! This combination, coupled with the fluidized bed principle combine to give a heat transfer rate of more than 10 times greater than current process technology allows. Thus the machine can be small and process times for some products as brief as a millisecond.

The diagram shows that the bed sits on a ring of narrow vents in the base of the heated vessel. These vents are formed by a disc of stationary, overlapping blades recessed to leave sharp slits thorugh which gas - hot air - can be blown at an acute angle against the bottom of the toroidal bed. The gas stream acts simultaneously as an air cushion, lifting the bed of granules, and as a propellant which causes it to set up a rotary movement around the base of the roaster.

Thanks to the efficiency of the process, the active zone can be quite small even for relatively high throughputs of beans. The Torbed 400 has been designed for work and downtime is kept to an absolute minimum. The Torbed is fully microprocessor controlled so that once the duration of the roasting has been determined by rapid trials with small quantities of beans, the process conditions can be stored by the computer for instant recall.