Chinook – roast-your-own beans

Cafe owners now have the opportunity to take ownership of their blends and roasts in a new customised roasting service with a difference. They can learn the basics of blending and roasting themselves – rather than hand the job over to someone else. It’s a viable option particularly if you own a new or small cafe. It’s also ideal for owners of larger cafes wanting to customise small quantities – for brewed coffees, for example.

You’ll be guided through the processes of blending and roasting by a professional roaster, who’ll lead you to a quality end product. It will be one that you’ll be personally proud of, having helped to create it. As this service is also offered to coffee enthusiasts who just want to learn more about coffee, you’re invited to bring along some of your customers to co-create what you’ll ultimately serve them in your cafe.

This new service is made possible by Chinook Air Flow roasting technology. It’s a fun hands-on way for both cafe owners and coffee enthusiasts to broaden their coffee knowledge and skill. This desire to learn about ‘all things coffee’ from bean-to-beverage, is something we are noticing as a strong trend among coffee enthusiasts.

A small sample roaster known as the Piccolo Chinook is where your blending and roasting experimentation and decision-making will take place. It provides the perfect balance of flexibility (to design and tweak a roast as you please) and consistency (by recording your personal roasting profiles on the Chinook’s built-in computer – so you achieve the same outcome each time you roast a recorded profile.

Following the basic class; you’re invited to return, buy a kilo or two of beans and hone your blending and roasting skills by yourself. Staff are always nearby, however, to answer any questions you may have.

With the option of roasting 500 grams, 1 kilo or 2 kilos at a time, The Piccolo Chinook is small enough so experimenting isn’t too expensive but large enough so you go away with enough beans to make a more considered assessment over a few days. As a roast takes just 10 minutes, within 3 hours you may roast enough beans to last a week or so in a cafe with smaller volumes. As the volume of your cafes increases, your weekly supply may then be roasted on a 25 kilo production roaster. Your roasting profiles recorded in the Piccolo Chinook are transferable to the production roaster.

There are currently 3 locations in Queensland offering this fun, roast-your-own service using the Chinook Air-Flow roasting technology – The Coffee Roaster in West End, First Batch Coffee Roasters in Noosaville and Zephyr Coffee Co in Coolangatta.