The new DirectRoaster from parent company iStill. All images courtesy of iStill.
A new all-electric commercial coffee roaster from The Netherlands called DirectRoaster is entering the market with a distinctive physical form plus a distinctive method of heat delivery.
Following its first public appearance at the Amsterdam Coffee Festival in April this year, the machine made a global debut in June at the World of Coffee trade show in Geneva.
The machine follows an industry trend towards smaller roasters that don’t require natural gas, yet it differs from most machines in that air is blown through a heating element that is integrated inside the drum. Through this system, heat inside the DirectRoaster is transferred to coffee almost entirely by convection.
While the drum is only heated internally by the same air that heats the beans, conduction is minimal. Radiation is mitigated by a heat shield between the heater and beans that spreads inbound hot air more evenly throughout the space as it enters.
By swapping only the heat element, a single machine and drum can be repurposed to scale up from 5- to 15-kilo-capacity roasting while maintaining the same accuracy, repeatability and energy efficiency, according to the company.
DirectRoaster parent company iStill, which specializes in high-tech automated distilling equipment for the spirits industry, is pitching the machine as capable of delivering faster and more efficient heat for commercial roasting applications.
With a dual-blower system, DirectRoasters devote one fan to driving air through the ceramic heat element inside the drum to heat the beans, while a second fan extracts smoke and moisture, sending hot exhaust into a thermal energy recovery system and heat exchanger. Fresh intake air is heated by the hot surface of the tube through which exhaust air exits.
“The intake air never has to make contact with it, only taking its heat energy,” DirectRoaster Product Engineer Nil Isil told Daily Coffee News. “This allows us to retain heat and increase efficiency while making sure the contaminants in the exhaust air are never reintroduced to the drum.”
Because the exhaust is cooled through the reintegration of its heat, Isil said an afterburner is also not necessary.
“The only cleaning necessary is to clean the exhaust tube of the ERS with a pipe cleaner ensuring that the condensates out of the drum are taken away,” said Isil.
Additionally, the preheated and dried intake air within the otherwise sealed system protects it from a roastery’s ambient environmental conditions.
“I like to use the example of April in the Netherlands weather, when it is cold in the morning with no humidity and warm in the afternoon with a lot of humidity,” Isil said. “As the roaster basically creates an insulated bubble where the roasting happens, these outside factors do not affect the roast too much. Some other roasters really struggle with this, especially with humidity.”
Four sensors in the machine monitor temperatures of inbound air, air exiting the heater, bean temperature and drum exhaust. Users can control drum rotation speed, fans and heater power. Roast profiles can be saved and automated.
iStill Founder and CEO Dr. Edwin van Eijk founded DirectRoaster following an early investment from a friend, who sought his fresh eyes and engineering expertise.
“He had nothing to do with coffee before except for enjoying drinking it,” DirectRoaster Head of Sales and Marketing Adam Janicsak told DCN. “This helped to not be biased by traditional coffee roaster machines, because he was not paying much attention to the technology before. He approached coffee roasting the same way as distilling, from a scientific perspective.”
Moving forward, DirectRoaster is planning to launch a first-crack detection system based on rate of rise, power input rate and exhaust moisture content data. The company is also looking beyond coffee, into the cocoa, nuts and grains categories.
The company is currently accepting preorders worldwide for €35,000 ($41,126 as of this writing) for the machine with a lower capacity heater, and €40,000 ($47,002) for a machine with the high-capacity heater. The company projects that the first machines will be in the hands of customers by early 2026.
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