Can you use a Coffee Roaster for Roasting Cacao?
Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, & Techniques
Matthew,
You'll find that most coffee roasting drums rotate too rapidly and tend to chew up cacao. I've tried in a Dietrich and a Joper and both produced significant levels of breakage. Also, these machines aren't engineered for the process of roasting cacao, which has different heat transfer characteristics and temperature profiles than coffee, so you'll find it's very difficult to dial back the heaters to achieve accurate temperature profiling without scorching. There's nothing better out there right now than a properly configured convection oven for roasting at that volume unless you have 200k, in my opinion. You can get used gas convection ovens for next to nothing. A spouting fluid bed coffee roaster would be my second bet, but fluidizing cacao requires much higher airflow than coffee, so you're batch volumes would be smaller than rated and you'll still have issues with erratic agitation and breakage. Good luck!