When I first started roasting in 2003, the company I was with had a roaster with a cooling tray that cooled the coffee in about seven minutes. Although this was considered to be acceptable when the roaster was built -- I'm guessing in the 1960's -- by 2003 standards it was far too slow. These days, roasters expect their coffee to be cooled in four minutes or less. As strange as it may seem, however, there was a time at the beginning of the modern roaster when there were no cooling trays at all! Coffee would simply be dumped out onto the floor and measures would be taken to keep it from combusting due to its exothermic nature at that point in the roast. William H. Ukers, in 1921, had the foresight to document these early days of modern roasting in his book, ALL ABOUT COFFEE. In it, he passes on to us the reminiscences of some of those who were roasting as far back as the 1850's. The following is an excerpt from Ukers' book:
The Carter "pull-out," was so called because the roasting cylinder of sheet iron was pulled out from the furnace on a shaft supported by standards, to be emptied or to be refilled from sliding doors in its "sides." It was in use for many years in such old-time plants as that of Dwinell-Wright Company... The picture of a roasting room with Carter machines in operation, reproduced here, recalled to George S. Wright, the present head of the Dwinell-Wright Company's business, the scene as he saw it so many times when, as a boy of ten or twelve, he occasionally spent a day in his father's factory. "The only difference I notice," he wrote the author, "is that, according to my recollection, there was no cooler box to receive the roasted coffee, which was dumped on the floor where it was spread out three or four inches deep with iron rakes and sprinkled with a watering pot. The contact of water and hot coffee caused so much steam that the roasting room was in a dense fog for several minutes after each batch of coffee was drawn from the fire." (Ukers, p. 630)
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