FAQ
How much does it cost?
By joining our roasting program you can get started with only a deposit and the cost of the electrical and ventilation install (typically about $1,500). There is no monthly lease charge, and you will instantly save money on your coffee costs - usually $2-5 per pound. The no-cost lease requires all green coffee be purchased from Roast Master. Our partners pay an average of $6-7 per pound for green coffee. After roasting, weight loss and electricity, you can expect to pay well under $8 per pound for your final product.
The roasters are available for outright purchase at the following retail prices:
- FAB 1.6 - $29,500
- FAB 5 - $36,500
What about roaster maintenance?
The roasters were designed by a team with 30+ years in industrial manufacturing and design and are extremely durable and reliable. Aside from occasionally changing gaskets, cleaning the glass and emptying the chaffe container, our roasters require no ongoing maintenance and many have been running for 8+ years with zero downtime.
As part of our roasting program, we come on-site with each green delivery and run through a 15-point checklist so that neither you nor your staff need to worry about maintenance.
What is the difference between air roasting and traditional drum roasting?
Fluidized-air-bed roasting is a 30+ year method of roasting coffee that has a long track record of producing great coffee. While most coffee is roasted in large batches in a rotating steel drum, our roasters roast coffee on a column of hot air that is meticulously controlled to produce comparable roast curves.
We believe that small-batch air roasting is the future of coffee roasting and produces a higher quality product overall. Getting fresher, high quality coffee to more customers, at a lower price, improves the coffee industry and enables coffee operators to educate and inspire their customers. Air roasting is also cleaner and considerably more consistent - removing smoke, chaff and other particulate during the roasting process versus trapping smoke inside the steel drum.
Traditional drum roasting requries a high degree of expertise, a large warehouse, gas lines and an entire separate system called an afterburner to deal with smoke and particulate. Our small batch roasters are all electrical, push button (we create and input the profiles in our lab), and well below the governmentally regulated air quality threshold of 11 lbs. per batch (varies by location).