In the winter of 2023, a sales rep from Loring came through Portland and stopped by the shop. She was lovely, and knew her machines, and when she left I had a quote on my desk for $42,000 — a brand-new Loring Smart Roast S15, computerized, energy-efficient, with a touchscreen and a USB port and an app that graphs your roast curves in real time.

I pinned the quote to the wall above the espresso machine, where I pin receipts I need to look at later. It's still there.

Mabel is a 1978 Probat L12. She weighs eleven hundred pounds. Her drum is cast iron, her burners are original, and her control panel has exactly three dials: gas, airflow, and drum speed. There is no app. There is no USB port. There is a little window in the front where you can see the beans tumbling, and a pull-out scoop for checking color, and a temperature probe that reads in celsius because no one at Probat in 1978 thought Americans might want to convert.

The case for replacing her

It's real, and I won't pretend otherwise. A modern roaster is maybe 30% more fuel-efficient. It gives you repeatability: you can save a roast profile and hit it, every time, within a few degrees. It logs everything automatically, so you don't have to scribble numbers on a clipboard while also watching the color, smelling the smoke, and listening for first crack.

"There's no romance in ruined beans. A bad roast is a bad roast whether you cried over it or clicked a button."

Claudia, my business partner, said that to me the first week we were open. She was right. The argument for modern equipment isn't bad. It's that you'll waste less coffee, pay less for gas, and spend less time on the least interesting parts of the job.

The case against

I can only speak for myself here, and the answer isn't the romantic one.

It's that when you roast on Mabel, you have to be in the room. You have to listen. You learn the exact pitch of first crack — somewhere between a firecracker and a dried leaf underfoot. You learn the color of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe at five-twenty grams, versus the slightly deeper color of the same bean at seventeen minutes rather than fourteen. You stand there, and you pay attention, and after about four years you stop having to think about any of it.

A touchscreen doesn't teach you that. It replaces the need to know it. And I didn't get into this to outsource the part of the work that I care about.

What we gave up

Probably some efficiency. Probably a few hundred dollars a month in gas. Probably a little sleep — I wake up at 4:45 on roast days, whereas with an automated drum I could sleep till 6.

What we kept: the part where roasting is a craft, done by a person, in a small room, with the smell of smoke and the sound of cracking beans and the feeling that you are the one responsible for what ends up in someone's cup in the morning.

Mabel is going to outlive me. That seems about right.