Hey all! New here, looking for something a little unique. Coffee Roasting Manual, Parts Catalogues, etc.
In a past career I was a coffee roaster, Q grader, and educator for the SCAA (now the SCA). I spent some time trying to collect manuals before life and events pushed me into a research and academic trajectory. I’ve been returning to my old hobby and am a little shocked that there’s so little out there. Despite the popularity of restoring old roasters, using them, and hobbyist enthusiasm, there’s a wealth of information vanishing from the field.
Be it Pre-1950s Probats, old guides from San Franciscan or Diedrich’s earlier days, a Sivetz that looks like a jet engine, The materials that came with the machines, or let people order spare parts, are simply vanishing. In discussions with colleagues and friends, the 2nd and 3rd wave of coffee materials are vanishing, too.
So I’m on a quest to use what I know about research and archiving to collect as much as possible. If you know a person willing to share, point them my way.
Here’s what I’ve recovered from nearly a decade ago. Stored on a flash drive, it’s now uploaded again. It’s a discovery that sparked this inquiry a decade or so later:
Hi Cool hobby! Thanks for sharing your cache. I used to roast (just for personal use). Were you by any chance on alt.coffee back in its heyday?
I was not, no. First time I’ve heard of it.
It was part of usenet, the earliest, plain text internet forums. I guess in a way a precursor to Lemmy and reddit, and alt.coffee was its equivalent of a community/subreddit for coffee nerds. (I’m showing my age!) Long before enshittification was even a gleam in a billionaire’s eye.