NXT Roasters

NXT Roasters is not a café — our focus is roasting high-quality, fully
developed beans with consistency and clarity.

NXT Roasters is an independent coffee roaster in Edmonton specializing in freshly roasted whole beans
for walk-in customers. Our 3kg fluidized bed (air) roaster handles the smoke of second crack roasting, ensuring full
flavour development without the sourness of under roasted beans. Variable batch sizes (1.7–3.1 kg) allow slower selling varietals, such as decaf, to remain fresh.

We prioritize freshness over full shelves and encourage customers to reserve beans prior to roast days.

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Let’s take a break from brewing.

Several times in the last days NXT clients mentioned that they had run out of coffee beans and it was inconvenient for them to drop in to re-stock so they tried another source of beans. They claim to be very disappointed. There are a lot of variables that affect the judgement, not all determine that the substitute product was inferior. Taste is subjective, sensitive, and sometimes variable. Coffee roasters may also choose different roasting levels depending on their preferences. All this, leads to surprise and perhaps dissatisfaction.

The NXT coffee roaster was designed to yield a bean flavour that we preferred. More clearly, it evolved and was modified to give the flavour we wanted. The starting criteria was to heat with electricity rather than roast with the exhaust of a flame. The fluidized bed was selected so that the beans, float in the air stream, therefore heat more evenly. This meant that a high pressure blower not a fan was required. It therefore has to turn very fast which creates a bearing problem because bearings can turn fast and they can operate in a hot environment, but they really don’t like to do both at the same time. That was a big and expensive problem to solve.

The coffee roaster roasts with air that is 100° to 250°C cooler than gas heated drum roasters yet roasts in half the time because of the improved efficiency of a fluidized bed. The heated air is cleaned and recirculated to make the system more cost efficient.

Similarly, killing the roast or halting the exothermic roasting process, by creating a low pressure inside the roaster by adjusting the air flow valves to then suck cool room air through the bed of roasted beans. At that point the roasted beans are at about 250°C while the room air is at about 20°C which cools the beans to kill the roasting process.

Cooling the beans quickly and evenly improves the consistency and roast repeatability. The beans are still hot so they are pneumatically conveyed to an external bean cooler for the final cooling. Simmultaneously the following batch is loaded.

The latest modification replaced the Blower Inlet which increased the pressure in the roasting chamber by 50%. Most likely the Blower was previously starved. It is always a little tricky to modify a component in a closed loop system because there can be unfavourable repercussions. It appears that the suction has also improved consequently the cooling is more efficient.

Additional components are: the Cyclone to spin off the chaff which encapsulates each bean, the SmokEater to neutralize the smoke (smells like burnt toast) generated by the beans, the Cooling Hopper where the beans are cooled from 160°C to 33°C, and of course the computer which is semi-automatically controlling the process.