Solar Coffee Roasting: A Weird Desert Experiment

today we're going to roast coffee with sunlight now I know what you're thinking your first thought's going to be something like this we're not doing this people have done that actually they're focused the sun's raised to roast coffee terrifying we're going to do something a little bit more practical maybe not practical something with real world implications I'm going to use the sun to roast coffee with this [Music] now I'm out here in California to visit Bellwether they make this roaster I've been an advisor to them for four or five years now and I had this idea and I told them I want to take a roaster to the desert capture the sunlight turn it into coffee and they agreed to help make that happen which makes this a sponsored video and therefore also because I'm using the roaster it makes it an ad but let me explain exactly what it is that I'm trying to do here now this this is the coffee we're going to be roasting today it's a Guatemalan coffee Club Manchester uh we're gonna give it away afterwards so we'll tell you more about that later so let me show you this thing because it's so cool this is a solar trailer and it's kind of what it sounds like you've got a big solar panel not a huge but a good size on top of the trailer and inside the trailer are a bunch of batteries which means that we can capture a full day's sunshine this thing has been here since the sun came up I'm going to let it catch all over the day and when I get to kind of sunset we're going to use what we stored and roast as much coffee as we can and I don't yet know how much coffee that's gonna be how viable is it to run a roaster on something like solar power foreign so I should probably explain why I would work with Bellwether I I have a kind of conflict here I have a coffee roasting company that supplies cafes and they build coffee roasting machines for cafes to roast their own coffee am I helping a competitor well I don't really see it that way now the reason that Bellwether is interesting to me is how coffee is generally roasted pretty much every cup of coffee drunk today is roasted using natural gas that's what's firing The Roaster creating the Heat and often burning the smoke that comes out of the roaster and we use a lot of gas and I'm not sure that's a good thing but we haven't really considered an alternative because for a long time gas was cheap gas was easy loads of people are using machines that were built even before the Exxon Engineers worked out that you know what they were doing was bad for the environment there have been electric Roasters before commercial Roasters but generally speaking they were kind of normal gas Roasters but with a different heat source and they weren't really engineered to be the the best of that kind of fuel type and people didn't like them and no one really considered them and then Bellwether came along and made me reconsider the future because at some point we have to stop burning gas we have to either we're going to run out or we're going to accept that burning that much gas is just a very bad thing to do to the environment now the challenge of electricity is scale now that machine needs about nine kilowatts of power that's about the same as like a three group espresso machine and it roasts about three kilos of coffee at a time and if you have a roaster that roasts maybe 90 kilos of coffee at a time well that seems like a difficult thing to scale like you need an awful lot of electricity that'd be a very fat cable to make that whole thing work as we begin to Electrify everything things like cars I think we're beginning to understand the infrastructure needs to do it and so that much energy is not actually a ridiculous thing to use in a commercial business when you're using electricity you can get it from anywhere and so that's why I wanted to see how viable something like solar was I wanted to just catch some free sunlight and use it because why not are we going to get much coffee out I don't know in fact while we wait for the sun to set we should probably do a little bit of maths [Music] welcome to my TED talk now here on the Whiteboard you see some beautifully rendered artistic versions of the things we're using today we have a Bellwether roaster we have the solar trailer and of course the Sun the sun we're gonna have to cover the massive of how this all works now light hits the solar panel magic happens you know what I mean like this bullying of electrons out of positions and things I don't even understand but it's converted to energy now they say on a good day we can get between 10 to 15 kilowatt hours of energy that's the kind of way that we talk about this so you could discharge say 15 kilowatts of power for one hour before you deplete what you've gained I'm hoping we get close to 15 because it's been a beautiful sunny day it's looking good now how much are you going to use to roast coffee now I don't really have the numbers for Bellwether we're going to find that out in a little bit but I do have the numbers full gas roasting per kilo I think roughly for everything right like that's heating up Roasters running we sort of roasted between batches everything we're looking at 0.8 kilowatt hours per kilo of coffee that was quite hard to write so if we got the maximum of 15 kilowatt hours and we was you know a gas roaster we would say we would get about 18.75 kilos of roasted coffee out but there's a problem right it's really hard to kind of factor in warm-up in this whole thing because every time you use a roaster you have to heat it up and that uses really quite a lot of energy and the more batches you do after the warm-up the more efficient that warm-up was per kilo today we're not going to have that much energy we're not going to be able to roast like 20 batches of coffee so our warm-up is going to be pretty impactful I think that it will take about half an hour to heat the roaster this roaster pulls 9.5 kilowatt hours and so half of that because half an hour would be 4.5 kilowatts of energy just to get it hot which feels stressful if we've got only 15 we've got to use basically a third of what we've captured to heat it up the question is going to be how efficient is it once it's running how much coffee can we actually roast from a reasonably small solar panel from one day's energy as the sun sets we're going to find out as you can see the sun is gone from the sky I checked the the battery we got just under 14 kilowatt hours of energy which I think is it's pretty good I'm pretty happy with that now I have to be honest with you uh I would be terrified to do this with most roasting machines because frankly I'm not a coffee roaster I've never really claimed to be a coffee roaster I have an involvement in a Coffee Roasting Company but it's not me in front of the roaster every day cranking out batch after batch that's not my skill set so the idea of roasting a bunch of coffee that I don't know super well on a machine that I don't know super well that loads of people will taste should be terrifying but it's kind of not this is a perfect machine for me right now once it's preheated it's going to be time to roast the Moment of Truth we'll have used I think around four and a half kilowatts of that 14 to start with I don't know what we'll get out of the remaining kind of nine and a half we will see all I have to do for this whole thing to work is there's a bunch of profiles of different coffees loaded here I'm going to select the one that has my name on it because that's the one we worked on and then in those pre-heat temperature all of that kind of stuff and once it reaches preheat temperature as long as this coffee and the hopper then it'll start roasting we should put some coffee in the hopper it has begun now it's like I do nothing for like eight minutes I feel useless in a good way we're nearly there six seconds left until the first roast is done the game today is going to be speed how quickly can we turn it around get more coffee done we have coffee badge number one is done batch two complete so I just did a quick check after the second batch and for the roasting process from the start where the coffee goes in until it comes out roasted it used round about 0.3 kilowatts per kilo of green coffee which is good but it certainly says the more we'd be able to roast continuously the more efficiency we would obviously get we are making our lives slightly Complicated by running this light on the solar battery because we're in the desert and there's no electrical sockets and that's probably like 500 watts of power maybe a little bit less now but that's that's having an impact so I I'll kind of work it out at the end and we'll be able to calculate how much this used how much this used how much coffee we got it's getting cold I think I need a jacket [Music] 15 kilos of coffee with us I'm feeling very confident we're going to get through all of it today this is about to be the fourth batch going in we've been roasting for about an hour now and so a couple batches left it's it's going well [Music] [Music] last one so batch five the final batch for the day or night is in the cooling tray and I just checked the battery and we've used pretty much exactly what we captured today to get to this point I think I need to check with the light that's a little bit confusing now I'm not gonna lie to you I made the call that we would make this final batch uh we're gonna cheat slightly and use a little bit more energy because we're going to cool this down sensibly and properly uh I won't use that much energy but it will use more than we captured today technically speaking I just want to be above board uh so we're gonna get it all packed up there's everything packed down for some reason we thought it would be a good idea to actually stay out here in the desert so I'm gonna go to bed in the lonely darkness and um I'm slightly terrified of that but I'll see you tomorrow see you tomorrow [Music] [Music] good morning I'm not going to lie to you the coffee we roasted last night tastes a little bit fresh it also tastes very satisfying I am kind of delighted by the fact that we turn sunlight into coffee and more coffee than maybe I I really deep down thought we were going to get the coffee itself as I said will give away there's a link in the description down below to Bell where the site where you can sign up to kind of enter to win and they'll contact you directly if you do win some of this coffee it's a it's just a very nice sweet clean delicious coffee I didn't want to pick something that was kind of distractingly weird or unusual I wanted people to taste the kind of roasted development for a light roast and see what they think this whole experiment to me has been a success and the point of this is not to try and convince people to switch immediately to Electric roasting or or is not to argue that electric Roasters are more efficient than gas Roasters the point of this whole thing was was about possibility to me it's about change in the future and and how we start now to adapt to the change that we need I don't see us switching away from gas in in the very near future it's just too cheap it's too embedded in what we do but we have to at some point except that burning liquefied squished dinosaurs is not the right way to roast delicious sustainable coffee and I'm interested in in kind of pushing for that change without compromising the taste of the coffee and so this experiment for me was just around can we do it is it viable could you put some solar panels on a roof and have a battery and turn a day sunlight in a cafe into a day's coffee and yeah depending where in the world you are yes for sure but you could take a day's wind probably or a days you know tidal energy or whatever renewable source and turn it into coffee if you're not reliant on burning gas I had a good time this was a gloriously bizarre experience I'm grateful to bellweather for saying yes I'd love to know your thoughts on this whole thing down in the comments below but for now I'll say thank you so much for watching hope you have a great day

Channel: James Hoffmann

Views: 396,265

Keywords: james hoffmann, james hoffman, jimseven, coffee

Id: qV0bJHizJBA

Length: 12min 50sec (770 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023