On this podcast, we had the honor of interviewing Tim Wendelboe, founder of the roastery and espresso bar, Tim Wendelboe, in Oslo, Norway. We talked to Tim about his roast profile and why his roastery only uses one for all of his coffees. We also talk to Tim about his refined cleaning routines, how the color sorter has improved his coffee quality, and how to deal with bottlenecks in the production line. This is our second interview with Tim Wendelboe. Our first interview was about roastery efficiency.
Host 00:04 Alright. Well hi Tim and thanks for your time and being with us. Tim Wendelboe 00:10 It’s a pleasure, hello again. Host 00:12 You are, for the second time on our Podcast that we have with Sovda. So I will put a link to the first episode that was almost a year and a half ago I think. Tim Wendelboe 00:26 Yea something like that it was during the pandemic and I think about a year after we installed the machine because we installed the machine on the day when we had lockdown in Norway. Host 00:35 Yes I remember that was the 8th or 9th of March and we were almost stuck in Norway for a long time if we hadn’t take the flight back to the US, that’s right. Tim Wendelboe 00:51 But fortunately we got everything to work and it has been working pretty well since then I think with very very few downtimes so that’s a good thing. Host 01:01 That’s cool so during this second chapter of the Podcast I think the intention is really to share a little bit about how it was for you to implement color sorting and our equipment in your production line and we have a lot people who come to us after seeing your video on instagram that you posted I think a year ago and they want to know what Tim think so I’m not sure what Tim think and it’s easier to have Tim say it himself and we thought it would be nice to do a second shot at results. So here we are. Tim Wendelboe 01:43 Yea perfect, I’m glad they’re coming to you and not to me. Host 01:48 Yea well it seemed to work well. 01:54 Good good, so to give a bit of context we installed our color sorter, the pearl mini, together with a lift that is bringing the coffee into your pearl mini and then once the coffee is sorted it goes into another lift, so another conveyer which is connected to your packing machine. And once you have roasted the coffee it goes straight into buckets and then you pour those buckets into a lift so it’s not connected directly to the roaster. And first can you tell us a little bit about this layout. Why you didn’t want it connected straight to the roaster perhaps. How does it work for you this way? Tim Wendelboe 02:45 Well logistically we could connect it straight to a lift. We would have to have a weight either in the cooling tray or in the lift so that we could weight the roasted coffee because part of our quality control is that we weight the beans before and after roast. I think back then the lift didn’t come with a scale, I don’t think it does now?? Host 03:09 It actually does now! Tim Wendelboe 03:11 It does okay, so we could potentially do that now. The only problem that we have is that we don’t have a lot of space so if we were to put a lift next to the roaster it would actually occupy a very important space for us on the floor which means the only way for us to transport green coffee and roasted coffee back and fourth to our storage facility would be blocked by a lift so that’s why we basically do it into buckets. I think you know if I had a different layout in my space, I would, especially now since the lift comes with a scale I would just do the lift straight out of the roaster. There would be no reason not to do that 03:55 So that’s kind of why we did it like that. Also the lift straight from the after sorting straight to the packing machine just makes sense. We have the packing machine across the room so that I think we had around five meters of tubing where the coffee would travel and one of the challenges with that in the beginning was that the velocity of the beans becomes quite fast or high at the end of that so we had a little problem with the breakage of the beans but we have solved that by drilling some holes into the vacuum tube that creates the vacuum in that transportation system. Host 04:42 Additional decelerator. Tim Wendelboe 04:45 A larger tube at the end which also makes that not such a huge problem. I think still it could be a problem if have very kind of porous coffee but for us there’s a little bit of breakage but its not a big problem anymore and a lot of the breakage we see is beans that probably would’ve been broken anyway like the biggest beans in a Kenya AA for instance is very often what you call elephant ears. So that’s basically it, it hasn’t really made our production any slower or anything because the only kind of difference is that after the first batch there’s a five to ten minute delay where we have to wait on the coffee to be sorted. But after that we can go and pack back to back because we are not able to pack fast as the machine is able to color sort and roast for that matter. So it hasn’t really delayed us anything so instead of the packing shift starting the same time as a the roasting shift now we have the second person coming fifteen to thirty minutes later. So its just a matter of dealing wit the logistics when it comes to people as well. Host 06:10 And so I remember when we set the machine up at your place we set one profile and said Tim this is one profile, you know how to do the other one and now, two years later we think you mostly run your coffee through this same profile so when I mention a profile, for the people who don’t know, its a color profile, so its similar to a roast profile. You will save some parameter. In this case you would save the air how long the air will blow on a bean, the delay, how long the camera will wait to eject a bean it has identified as a reject and obviously the color. So in our case the main color we play with is really the color of our quaker since two other color we use are for burned bean. This is very very way out of the spectrum. Its basically black while the rest of the coffee is different hues of brown and the other color is for something that is not even coffee is to sort out this cement, this patio so you play on a color profile with this quaker color. Some of our users have one profile per coffee but I don’t think that’s how you do it. Could you tell us a little bit more about it. Tim Wendelboe 07:40 Yea so I don’t really personally calibrate the machine myself. My team is doing that so the team leader in the roastery she has been tweaking it slightly since we started using it but not much. I know she regularly checks it, there’s a little light you can check that its actually sorting the way it should and also obviously you see it on the results like if your quaker bucket is full of acceptable beans then there would be something wrong and vice verse if your roasted already sorted coffee is full of quakers then you would have to do something. We have actually had a few incidents where we have found stone in our coffee still. I think you could never get rid of that problem one-hundred percent because when you’re sorting coffee beans a stone might fall simultaneously with a coffee bean and the camera might not pick them up a hundred percent. And even if it did maybe the air blown was not good enough to get rid of that stone so I think still if you want to be one hundred percent stone free there’s almost no such thing. You would have to make sure that the mill in the producing country was cleaned meticulously before milling because we don’t dry any of our coffees that we buy on cement patio. We still get patio in our coffee and that’s normally coming from the dry mill that you’re using because they are not cleaned very well between batches. And also I think a de-stoner I just saw that you launched your de stoning lift which I am very interested in installing because hopefully that could get rid of the problem ninety nine point nine percent. But its very rare that we get stones and its even rarer now that we started with the color sorter because we do find a stone every now and then in the bucket with the sorted coffee. So to get back to the profile we actually just have one profile and a lot of people ask me if its worth investing in a color sorter and that’s really a complex thing to answer because it really depends on your acceptance. Like if you have money to invest in your coffee roastary the first thing I would invest in is better quality green coffee because if you start with really really high quality green coffee the need for a color sorter is not that high anymore. Still you can improve the coffee. Still with our coffees that I consider to be extremely high quality we do get quakers so yea you can improve your already very high quality coffee. Like even if you buy auction geisha lots from Panama which you know are like two, three, four hundred dollars per pound you still get quakers and especially in those types of coffees the customer gets really disappointed if they get quakers in the bag so that’s a good investment to get rid of those but also on the other hand for instance when I bought and im buying the natural processed coffee from a producer in Ethiopia and he had some challenging years during the past three seasons because the weather there and everything and even if he had some high quality year that means you know the trees are going well, the harvest is, the cherries are well harvested. The time during drying is dry and sunny so you kinda rely on those factors and the milling is going okay we still get a lot of quakers in naturals and I just kind that when you sort out all the quakers because you will have a little bit more quakers in a natural processed coffee. When they get sorted out the coffee gets much much better like much cleaner and more consistent. Maybe for a barista that brews 15 grams of coffee at a time and can pick out all the quakers by hand this is something they can do manually when you’re selling coffee to you know restaurants and cafes that might be brewing two three four liters at a time, this is super important because a few quakers will really make the brew taste like popcorn and peanuts. So in our roastary to answer your question we only use one color sorting profile because most of our coffees they don’t have a lot of quakers so what we’re looking at is, is it actually sorting out quakers only or it is sorting out other beans as well and if it is we have to adjust it a little bit and like I said vice verse if we have too many quakers in our sorted coffee that means we need to adjust the machine a little bit. So its kinda more towards that and of course like if we were roasting a lot more lower quality coffees and high quality coffees at the same time we would probably use different profiles. Because I would probably accept more quakers in the lower quality coffees. Host 13:05 Right so yea thinking of a case of two things one is because you only use very high quality coffee you are tweaking your profile very minimally. And second thing is I know the person who is adjusting the cross sorter is someone who understands coffee with a the roaster usually is someone who can understand oh this is good and this is bad. The person couldn’t really take the decision and I think this is a really for why it works case to have this one profile fit them all kind of and this small tweak undergone. Tim Wendelboe 13:56 And I think that I can add that with actually don’t throw away everything we sort out so what we do at the end of the day we normally have a full bucket of coffee that’s been sorted out. We actually re sort it and then the kind of good coffee from that bucket we sell for a very discounted price to our customers and we just say what it is. This is not coffee of the highest quality and you know that’s why its discounted but then the kind of quakers that we sorted out from that goes in into the big we want to try to find some place to use it. Might be used in other products like it could make a fake peanut butter because it would taste like peanuts. Host 14:45 Yea there’s these there are soaps, candles there are everyone is trying to find something to do because putting them in the bin when you know all the journey of this coffee bean is a bit of a failure and the easiest is really to do compost because we can’t really go wrong. Tim Wendelboe 15:10 For sure. We actually have a cooperation with a lady who makes she has a oyster mushroom farm like its basically a storage place where she grows oyster mushrooms on coffee so she can use it and she also makes soap so and its not crazy amount that were throwing away but I would say that you know when we did this exercise when we saw that we had a full bucket of quakers in one run that means we are actually sorting out a little bit more than we need from our kind of best coffee and then from that bucket of rejects when we sorted one more time and I cupped it the coffee tasted pretty good. That just means its a blend of many different coffees and there might be an occasional quaker inside but its still pretty good coffee. But the rejects from that is tasting pretty awful that’s why were kind of keeping it away. You’d be surprised at how you know like a country like Kenya when you buy coffee from Kenya there almost no quakers that’s just because the coffee, especially if you’re buying from a cooperative, there grading the coffee three four times at the wet mill based on density and gravity and then there also a lot of times hand sorting the parchment while the coffee drying and then when the coffee goes in the dry mill you still have grad 1 grade 2 grade 3 qualities and out of that you have different screen sizes so if you buy a AA from Kenya there’s very very few quakers because of this. But if you buy coffee from lets say a producer that has mechanical debris remover where they don’t use water to grade the coffee in washing towels and stuff that means you will naturally will get a little more quakers unless you have done a lot of density table sorting and stuff from the dry mill so you know every coffee has different needs in terms of how many quakers you need to sort out. I just find that when we have this one program fits all some coffees you might a little bit more than you need but I prefer to be safe. Better to be safe than sorry because our customers expect the highest quality so that means we have very little acceptance for quakers. Better we got the color sorter we didn’t do any sort of sorting other than picking it out by hand and you don’t get a full bucket of rejects by doing that during a day so I would say that it has improved our quality tremendously.