The Wild Drink Blog

With competition looming, Hugo and I took a (very) long trip up to Peterborough yesterday. You guessed it (it was the title right?), we weren’t in Peterborough for the sight seeing, we were there because it is the home of Masteroast.

Masteroast are moving to brand new premises towards the end of the year, the new roastery will include state-of-the-art stuff such as automated silos which allocate greens to the correct sorting area, roaster and if necessary grinder. They’ll also have a dedicated training area and group cupping room for guests. In the old premises it’s business as usual, but the great thing is that the roasts vary in size from tiny 2.5kg gourmet batches all the way up to the Lilla CG10S profile roaster which is capable of roasting 500kg per hour. Total output is about 7 tons per day.

Masteroast roast for Origin coffee, Hugo and I both use the Origin ‘Triple certified’ Colombian, Honduras and Sumatran Lintong blend on a daily basis, but Stuart Hargie of Masteroast is also roasting mine and Hugos competition blends which was the reason we were there. I’m not going to give away any details about my blend until after the competition, but I’m very happy with it and can’t wait to use it on Tuesday.

We tasted all the component coffees of out blends and after copious amounts of espresso we had a tour of the premises.

Looking goooood…

After the lengthy processing of my own coffee it is incredible to see such vast amounts of coffee in one place, it’s only now after my own experiences that I can comprehend the amount of work that must have gone into getting these greens to the roaster. Huge sacks piled everywhere waiting to be sorted into silos and then roasted for the customer. There are magnets built into the huge hoovers which suck the greens up to stop bolts, shrapnel, bullet casing and even machetes from finding their way into the roaster. Sorry if the pictures are a bit rubbish, I was struggling with light levels.

We moved from the silos onto loading of greens into a roaster then witnessed a computer controlled profile roast, above is a picture of the cooling. Stuart then showed us a huge wall of draws each containing coffee roasted at different levels then allocated a number depending on darkness of roast. Pictured above is a light roast graded at 122 and a very dark one at 55, check out the full flickr set for more pictures of this.

After roasting we went to the packaging area which is pretty interesting in itself, we even saw some Origin coffee being packaged up and the x-ray to check for any anomalies that could somehow have found their way into the bag. Anything other than a coffee bean shows up as a yellow blip on the screen. Very cool.

So, job done, lots of espresso, a fuzzy head and a few bags of coffee better off we headed back home. 12 hours on the road in one day!