Written by:
Dušan Matičič
Head of coffee and Head roaster at GOAT STORY

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(Scroll down if you just want to see the video)

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Keeping things clean is essential for good coffee.

But coffee is not a clean product. You know it - just imagine what a sticky brownish mess your coffee corner would be if you didn't clean it up regularly.

A roastery is pretty much the same, but on a larger scale. Roasting coffee creates a whole lot of dirty stuff that gets caught or stuck in the roasting machine: chaff, oils, dust ... and when you combine all that dirt with intense airflow and high heat, you get all this mess combined and baked on the insides of a roasting machine.

Our trusty Diedrich IR-12 roasting machine is a true workhorse: it's heavy, it's reliable, it is the tool that helps us make tasty coffee. But it does have its needs and cleanliness is one of them.

Here is my roaster cleaning routine:

Every roast day:
- removing the chaff from the chaff collector
- vacuuming coffee particles from underneath the cooling tray
- cleaning and disinfecting the cooling tray

Every week:
- removing the chaff from the cyclone (that's a motorized add-on that catches the dirty stuff in the outgoing air)
- lubricating the bearings to keep the roast drum turning smoothly
- a good wipe of the exterior to keep the machine looking good

Every month:
- cleaning of temperature probes

Every 3 months:
A complete tear down and cleaning of the machine:
- scrubbing the inside to remove all the stuck dust, chaff and oils
- cleaning the exhaust pipe (yuck)
- removing the cooling tray and cleaning everything below it
- detailed cleaning of the outside to get rid of stuck dirt

While the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance is pretty OK, the complete tear down is dirty business that usually takes a whole work day. Not just because of the machine cleaning, but basically a complete clean-up of the roastery.

But hey, what needs to be done is not hard to do, right? Regular maintenance and cleaning of the roasting machine is essential for great coffee. So as much as I hate it, I actually love it 😂😂😂

Check the video of a typical "every 3 month" roaster clean-up. 

If the video above was not too disturbing, you can check out how good the coffee from a clean roasting machine tastes like ...

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