About A Giesen

We here at Black Market Coffee roast coffee. Did ya know? It’s true. We roast coffee and we love it. There’s always something new, either a completely new coffee like last month’s gem from Laos, or an old (not actually old, but you know what I mean) faithful that we fine tune to get even more sweetness and complexity out of. 

There are many things which are nice to have in a roastery – pot plants to freshen up the place, 0.2mm sharpies to write stuff with, beers in the fridge – but to be a roastery that can roast coffee in a meaningful and actual way, you need a roaster. 

Aaaaand… we have one! And boy george do we love it. And we’ve been a little slow in properly introducing it to you. Apologies,* but we’re rectifying it now!

Roasters are big purchases, not just in size (though you can get cute as a button sample roasters that do 100g of beans at a time. Very good for playing with roasting profiles, not amazing for wholesale roasting), but these puppies are big-ticket items, and one doesn’t just add it to one’s shopping cart as one would a side of onion rings to ones uber eats. 

This needed a bit of thought, a bit of rumination. There are a few especially top shelf roasters to choose from, but we did finally, satisfyingly, land on our beloved Giesen W30A. Here’s why:

It makes tasty coffee. Call us finicky fussy, or pettifogging, but we felt this was an important factor.

It’s built with the roaster and roaster in mind, the machine and the human. It has a bean vacuum loader and destoner which makes back to back roasting possible, perfect for doing high volumes while keeping the highest quality every time. This configuration also allows the machine to be operated by one person – no team of helpers needed for loading or extracting the kilos upon kilos upon kilos of beans! Also means a little less of a workout, but that time saved is taken straight to the gym! Or maybe some bicep curls with an ale at the bar.

It has intelligent software that can connect to external programmes like Cropster (a great community roast profile platform), and also allows for automated profiling – so if you have developed a banger profile for a particular bean, you want to make sure you nail that every time, and the software takes out the element of human error that might occur if the roaster needed to sneeze, scratch, create a tiktok at just the critical moment…

It’s a supportive company. They’re like the grandparents that live nearby and can look after the kids at a moments notice, rather than the ones you havennt seen for three years as they squander your inheritance on luxury cruises and gortex walking gear. You love them, but they can’t water your plants while, heaven forbid, you take two of your 43 annual leave days. Boomers, am I right?

But there’s a deciding factor in any big decision, and this may, or may not, be it. Our Geisen was lovingly engineered and crafted in Holland, and good things come from Holland. Like stroopwafels (microwave for 5 seconds), gouda, wooden clogs, Michiel Hiesman (Daario, GOT), wi-fi, orange carrots, and Jess! 

And as an old boss of Jess’ once said, “If it’s not Dutch, it’s not much.”

Zowaar!

 

 

*I recently sent a rather important email and wrote I apologies instead of I apologise. I’m embarrassed, and still uncertain if I used the right word in this context. The whole thing has really muddled my confidence.