Fred Aiken Writing

My boss sends me a Slack message, How long will it take you to roast 80,000lbs of coffee? I immediately think it’s a trick question meant to keep me on my toes. But then I see that he’s still typing. The next message is that based on his calculation, it would take a little under 200 hours to roast 80,000lbs of coffee. He’s serious.

Fuck. He’s serious.

So, I finished roasting the Sumatra Gayo coffee I was currently in the middle of, and then I pull up the computer’s calculator. The roaster that I use has a max capacity of 35kg, which is about 77lbs. But coffee loses about 13-15% of its weight going from green to roasted due to water loss, so a max-capacity batch roasted to a light or medium roast would be approximately 65lbs, give or take. And the roaster can only roast 4 roasts per hour.

With all that in mind, I run the numbers of how many roasts I would need to do, and it’s about 1230 roasts that I would need to do, which would come out to be about 307 hours thereabouts. But more than likely it would be more. There’s a lingering unforeseen, invisible calculus being orchestrated in any mathematical business decision. Sure, my boss and I can run the numbers and say, well, that’s how long it should take to roast that much coffee. But obviously there would need to be down time. There would need to be time for maintenance on the roaster. Time to load the machine. Time to clean the machine.

I can easily take that 307 hours of roasting and stretch it to 400, possibly even 500 easy.

I ask, When would the client need this coffee?

In 3 weeks. 4 tops.

Not possible. Not even close. I work 40hours. It would mean I would need to roast 24/7. I wouldn’t be able to, no one would.

To which he responds, We would hire temps. You could train them to roast this one specific coffee on a specific roast profile. It’ll be fine. We’ll add a 2nd and 3rd shift.

Maybe. But logistically it would be a nightmare. There’s any number of things that can go wrong during a roast. You’re dealing with a big metal drum spinning over a flame that’s being fed by natural gas. Coffee can and does combust given enough thermodynamic energy. It’s not like we couldn’t train a small army of temps to roast around the clock. But again, the roasting machine is, well, a machine. It needs time to cool down, undergo maintenance, cleaned, and given a little breathing room less something dramatic happen. Like for the roaster to explode.

Which has happened. The first week I started roasting, the owner of the company implored me to take special note of all the safety training I went through because less than a month prior a roastery in Colorado exploded from a production roaster not paying attention and the gas line ignited and blew the entire place to kingdom come. Though thankfully everyone survived. They made sure to make note of that when recounting the anecdote of why it was important not to mess up the roasting machine; I guess so the tale didn’t seem too grim.

Either way, roasting 80,000lbs of coffee at our company would be a herculean undertaking. There’s plenty of macroroasters that would easily do that sort of roasting in under a week. But unfortunately we’re not that type of roaster. I also happened to do the math of how many bags of green coffee that would require, and we wouldn’t even have the space to store it prior to the coffee being roasted. The potential client would have wanted 80,000lbs of Brazilian coffee, which comes in burlap jute bags that weigh 59kg. That brings the total to 715 bags needed. The warehouse holds approximately 400 bags of coffee at any given point.

Any way you split it, such a project would not be feasible when all the numbers are taken in to consideration. But this is all just to say that I guess I owe my 6th grade algebra teacher an apology when I told them that I would never need to know math in the real world because I had planned on becoming a professional skateboarder when I was younger. I suppose that goes to show just how little you can plan out your life when you’re just going through puberty and trying to ollie down ten step stairs on a regular basis.