Inside a Probat UG-22: A Conversation With a Third-Generation Roaster

Inside a Probat UG-22: A Conversation With a Third-Generation Roaster

Eva Marín''s coffee roaster was built in 1954. It was installed in her grandfather''s storefront in Barcelona in 1956, moved once during a renovation in 1982, and has been in continuous daily use ever since. Seventy years. The same orange-painted cast iron drum, the same gas burner assembly (rebuilt three times), the same fundamental design that Probat has been iterating on — but not really changing — since the 1880s.

I spent a morning with Eva recently, partly to talk about her business, partly because I wanted to understand what a modern specialty roaster can learn from a machine older than most of the people running it.

On why she still uses it:

"People ask me this constantly. There are new machines, computer-controlled machines, machines that can profile a roast automatically. Why this old thing? And the answer I always give is that this machine does not lie to me. If I roast a bad batch, it is my fault. I can feel when the drum temperature is wrong before the thermometer confirms it. I can smell when the beans are going too fast through first crack. The machine is not in the way between me and the coffee."

On modern roasting software:

"I am not against it. My son has a Loring at his cafe in Madrid and the profiles are incredible. But there is a specific thing that happens when a person has been on a machine for 30 years — you develop an intuition that software can measure but cannot replace. I think my best roasts are the ones where I ignored the gauges and trusted my nose."

On what the Probat does well:

"Slow thermal mass. This roaster — with all that cast iron — holds heat like nothing else. When I drop a batch in, the temperature dip is 15-20 degrees lower than on a modern machine with the same burner output. That means the development stage is more forgiving, the momentum is consistent, and small operator errors do not cascade. It is a machine that rewards patience."

"The downside is that it takes 40 minutes to preheat properly from cold, and it uses more gas than modern machines. For a small roaster doing 8-12 batches a day, the efficiency penalty does not matter. For a bigger operation, it would."

On what she has learned about green coffee:

"The most important thing I have learned from this machine is that good green coffee wants to be roasted less than you think. Every generation of this shop, we have reduced our development times. My grandfather roasted medium-dark. My father roasted medium. I roast medium-light and my customers complain less, not more, every year. The beans are better. The processing is better. They do not need us to punish them."

On the specialty coffee industry:

"I love what is happening in coffee right now. But I also worry that the focus on the new — new varieties, new processing, new gear — distracts from what is actually constant. Good green coffee, roasted carefully, brewed carefully, tastes like good coffee. That has not changed in seventy years in this shop. I hope it does not change in the next seventy either."

On advice for new roasters:

"Learn on a drum. I do not care which drum — Probat, Diedrich, Giesen, whatever — but a traditional drum roaster. Once you understand thermal momentum, charge temperature, the rate of rise curve by feel, then you can go to a fluid bed or a hybrid and it will be a new tool. But if you start on the easy machine, you learn shortcuts that you will have to unlearn later. Always learn on the hard one first."

The shop was busy by 10 AM — regulars buying bags, a few tourists drifting in from the street. Eva roasted three more batches while we talked, loading and unloading greens with the unthinking rhythm of someone who has done the same physical motion more than 50,000 times. The shop smelled of green coffee and the specific caramel-floral note that comes off a Probat just after first crack. I bought a bag of a washed Colombian she had roasted the day before, walked back to my apartment, and brewed it as a V60 that afternoon.

The coffee was excellent. I do not think it would have been any better on a machine built last year. I am more and more convinced that what matters in roasting — as with almost everything else in specialty coffee — is the hands and the attention and the years of practice, and the machine is just the tool that someone careful happens to be holding.