Peter Wolff with the Probat Probatone25 Series II
WOLFF WEEKLY VLOGG 022 | Peter Wolff with the Probat Probatone25 Series II
Hello and thank you for tuning in, my name is Peter Wolff. Today we’re wanting to talk about the new Probatone P25. We’re very proud to say that we’re the agents for Probat roasters for both Australia and New Zealand and it gives us an opportunity to showcase what a wonderful piece of equipment we have today.
For those of you who don’t know, Probat has been manufacturing roasters since 1868. That makes them the longest manufacturer of coffee roasters in the world today. They’re still producing a cast iron front plate, so still using cast iron components. It has the double drum configuration - so we have an outer drum which takes the initial direct heat, we have an air gap in the middle, which infuses that heat into the inner drum and allows for a very consistent heat to radiate into that inside drum.
One of the things I really love about the new P25 is it has a premix burner, so we’ve moved away from a traditional atmospheric burner to a burner that mixes both the air and the gas together as a combined concentration and then moves it forward to the firing chamber. So what this allows us is a very consistent burn that comes from the roaster, but also high control. So we now have true stepless burner where we can modulate between a hundred, down to zero percent.
We also have a really substantial cooling tray. We’ve really beefed up the cooling tray and the cooling fan now. So independent heating and cooling, so when we do dump the coffee into the cooling tray, it does cool the coffee down very quickly. We want to do this because it helps us retain the sweetness in the coffee but also allows us to get our next roast on quicky.
We also have a lovely new lighting configuration that can go in as an option. We also have an option of adding in our drum speed control which will also be controlled electronically using the roasters pilot software. A lovely touch screen interface as well. This will display the graph, the temperature of all of the probes that are located within the roaster and also the gas output. But it is also connected to the pilot roast control system so it does run next to that as well.
The other things that are key as features of the roaster is that it’s certainly at the top end of what we call the shop roaster segment. You should be able to produce about 3 tonne of coffee on this a week. So 25 kilo capacity of green coffee, you’re going to be looking at an average of 20kilo batch sizes coming out and you’d be looking at about doing three to four batches on average an hour. That is dependent obviously on your roast profile duration. So you should be doing about 80kgs an hour of productive roasting. So on an eight hour day that 640kg of coffee.
It certainly is a very high capacity unit. It’s very easy to maintain. All the new probatone roasters have a direct drive motor and gearbox combination. So we now have no need to look at filling the gear boxes up with oil, it’s a completely sealed unit. We don’t have any external chains or sprockets to worry about. Really clean and simple. There’s lots of considerations made in the roaster today to make it very low maintenance. We only need to be really concerned about one front bearing. The rear bearing will need to be replaced every 2,000 hours. Apart from that it’s just a matter of keeping our flumes clean and also making sure that our cyclones and our fans are all maintained and cleaned as well. But apart from that, it’s a beautiful roaster, and we’re happy to have it here at the Wolff Roast Haus.