Solar Powered Coffee Roaster

Here’s something you don’t see everyday. A couple of brothers out on the west coast of the US have got something really cool going with a coffee addiction and the power of the sun.

Mike Hartkop is a ‘classically trained’ coffee roaster and his brother, David, seems to be a bit of an inventor who has come up with a solar powered coffee roaster for his roasting kin.

The solar roaster is a parabolic mirror array that’s focussed onto a roasting drum who’s motors are also solar powered. On a sunny summer day in southern Oregon, the array can concentrate up to 4.5 KW of thermal energy onto the drum, producing temps of 600 degrees F.

With Momma Nature’s help, Mike can crank out 7lbs of fresh roasted coffee per hour in 2lb batches. Unfortunately, that’s only in the summer, as Mike is located in Oregon and it rains there the rest of the year.

They’ve got a web site for selling their sunny goodness (www.solarroast.com) with lots more info on their roasting apparatus as well as a blog, though it appears as though they are sold out of their stock for this year.

[via the Make magazine blog]