Solar Shop Roaster

Many places want to roast their own coffee for various reasons: standing out amongst the many, stepping up professionally, expanding coffees available, offering fresh coffee, raising coffee sales. These include: Cafés, bakeries, coffee-chains, coffee academies, specialty coffee shops, retail venues, supermarkets and, actually, any surrounding where time efficiency is important to maintain, and that can be any existing business.

Quality: Roasting in-house is your own personal stamp of quality. By roasting your own coffee you’re sending a clear and visible message to your customers that you know what you’re doing, that you are a professional. Just like restaurants with an open-kitchen, you should be proud to show your customers the processes which you transform the raw material (green coffee beans) into that wonderful elixir in their cup.

Freshness: The single, most important aspect about roasted coffee is freshness. Roasted coffee beans oxidize and become stale over a very short period of time. If you’ve ever tasted a fresh cup of coffee, you already know this. No matter what the brew method is, coffee is best when it’s fresh. Roasting your own coffee is as fresh as it gets.

Food cost: Roasted coffee costs more than green coffee. That’s a fact. And once you start creating your own products you can be sure that you’ll also be selling more of them.

No, you don’t. We have many years of personal and professional experience in the coffee industry and we know what it’s like to run a café. There are dozens of things to do, on a daily basis, other than roast your own coffee. The Solar shop roaster is intended exactly for those who want to roast their own coffee but without needing to read many books, attend costly seminars and gain years of experience. It took us years of R&D until we finished the Solar; our best proof of excellence is our hundreds of satisfied customers with over 1000 machines roasting automatically around the world. The Solar is living proof that anybody can roast their own coffee.

In any circumstance that someone has the need or desire for roasting by themselves, but not the time or experience to do so manually.

Two issues should be known:
1. Roasting coffee in a small batch manual machine requires skills, attention and lots and lots of time.
2. The challenge of repeatability with the roasting results.

The fact is that the Solar produces better coffee than any other roasting machine in the market, and this fact was determined in a laboratory by unbiased coffee specialists.

The Solar is a synergetic machine – its’ different elements work together in order create an artisan crafted roast.

Three electric heating elements sit, meticulously placed, below a perforated drum. A built-in roasting management software controls the roasting cycle, while using the temperature as a reference point, as opposed to time as a reference.

During the roast, the Solar applies four different types of thermal treatment to the beans – conduction, convection, thermosiphonic and infra-red.

The Solar is the only shop roaster in the world that combines the two different methods of roasting (drum conduction and hot air convection) during the roast cycle, while delivering the best of both methods.

Throughout the roast, every two minutes the Solar implements fluid-bed roasting for exactly six seconds. We’ve placed the Solar’s blower at the bottom of the machine so when hot air is forced upon the beans, it actually condenses the air inside the drum, thus eliminating differences in bean size, density and humidity. This is one of the reasons Solar is perfect for roasting blended green coffee, in addition to single-origins.

The Solar comes with roasting management software of its own, embedded inside the machine. The Solar does not have to be connected to anything at all; the whole of the software is embedded in the machine’s core system and is controlled by an onboard computer. The Solar allows superb roasting of single-origins as well as blends, while profiling is conducted by the simple push of a button, allowing the roaster to achieve one of the main goals of every roaster – consistency. Add to this the fact that the Solar performs in-drum cooling and then stops automatically and you have the ultimate shop roasting system available.

The Solar Roaster was built from start to finish, with you, the user in mind. We aimed at manufacturing a machine that will be little hassle, rarely needing replacements or spare parts, and lasts a lifetime. At the end of the day, a good machine is a ‘smart and simple’ machine.

For this reason we’ve made the Solar maintenance-free and easy to service, should it need to be. Ordinary maintenance is the simplest you could ask for, we even use thumb-nuts for quick and easy release on the detachable parts of the machine. No need for special solvents, tools, or technical know-how in order to keep the Solar up and running for years to come.

The Solar has the capability to roast continuously. You are more than able to roast with the Solar 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Many of our customers use the Solar in order to roast up to 200 Kg (450 lbs.) a month. Chances are that you and your employees will tire before the Solar does. As long as the simple maintenance is performed, the Solar is good to go.

Many places can simply have a duct (chimney) connected to the Solar and tunnel the smoke to the outside. In other places this is not a possibility. But, with our Avirnaki smoke elimination system, you can roast indoors without the need for ducting. The Avirnaki cleans 100% of the Solars emissions.

Roasting coffee indoors was, for a long time, a serious problem to face. It usually involved setting up clumsy and expensive venting arrangements, and over time, deterioration of the venting could damage the quality of the roast. Venting arrangements require periodical maintenance & service, and in general caused a big headache to owners and operators.

Thanks to the Avirnaki, our revolutionary smoke elimination system, this problem is no more. The Avirnaki is a wheeled smoke trapping system which also serves as a connected table-top for our shop roasters. It’s simple, easy to use, and requires the simplest cleaning procedures while making roasting indoors easy for anyone, anywhere, any time.

Believe it or not – quieter than a typical microwave oven!