#25 Lessons learned in Prague: from a frying pan to the Typhoon

This September has been especially important for us. After months of comparing options, doubting, and growing in the meantime, our new roaster has finally arrived: a fully electric Typhoon.

Choosing it wasn't easy. There are so many manufacturers, sizes, and technologies, and for quite some time, we continued working with our Aillio Bullet while trying to decide which machine made the most sense for Black Jebena. The decision took so long that we even ended up buying a second Bullet so we could continue to increase production.

When we finally chose the Typhoon, we knew that it wasn't enough to just install it and start roasting. It was a different technology, and we had to learn how to use it well. That's why we traveled to Prague for training.

My relationship with roasting, however, began long before any software, curve, or sensor. I grew up in Ethiopia roasting coffee in a pan, observing the color of the beans, listening to them, and learning to react to what was happening in front of me. Going from the pan to the Bullet felt relatively natural: I was still doing the same thing, but with more control.

The Typhoon was another story.

I knew how to roast coffee, but now I had to learn to translate years of experience to a machine that responded in a completely different way. During the first moments of the training, I felt like my eyes understood what was happening before my hands were capable of reacting.

My trainer was very young—young enough to be my son—and seeing him work with such ease made it even more obvious what I still had to learn. At first, it seemed like my fingers couldn't keep up with what I was seeing.

But after hours of working, correcting, and repeating, something changed.

By the end of the training, my fingers started to move almost before my head. The machine stopped feeling foreign.

And that was probably one of the greatest lessons of the trip: changing roasters doesn't mean starting from scratch, but it also doesn't mean that all your previous experience translates automatically. Every machine has its own language.

In my case, the journey has been quite peculiar:

pan → Bullet → Typhoon

Three very different technologies, but the same idea behind them: observing the coffee, understanding how it responds, and trying to bring out the best that is already inside each bean.

Prague, however, ended up teaching me something else.

Beyond the training, I was very surprised by the city's coffee culture. The interesting thing was not just that there was specialty coffee everywhere, but that many times it didn't even need to advertise itself as specialty coffee.

You could walk into any espresso bar and trust that there would be a good cup, freshly roasted coffee, batch brew, or single origins.

It didn't seem like something reserved for tourists or people obsessed with coffee.

It seemed like something everyday.

And that made me think a lot about Spain.

Here, it still happens frequently that you can be in an excellent restaurant, with good food, good wine, and a beautiful space, and yet the coffee is the part that no one seems to have thought about too much.

I have gotten so used to that that when I travel, I usually look ahead to see where I will be able to have a good coffee. Sometimes I even end up carrying coffee and a grinder with me, almost as if I were packing a suitcase for another one of my children.

In Prague, that wasn't necessary.

There were enough local roasters supplying cafes and their own community that good coffee was part of day-to-day life.

And perhaps that is one of the things I would most like to see grow here as well: more local roasters, more cafes working with them, and less need to turn good coffee into something exceptional or pretentious.

Because perhaps the ultimate goal of specialty coffee should be precisely that:

that it stops feeling “special”.

That it simply be good coffee.

Fresh.

Well roasted.

Accessible.

I returned from Prague with a new machine, a lot to learn, and a great desire to get started. The Typhoon is already in Seville, and now the most interesting part begins: making it our own.

From a pan in Ethiopia to an electric roaster in Seville, passing through the Bullet and a few days of training in Prague.

The road has changed a lot.

The coffee, not so much.

I keep watching, listening, and trying to understand what each bean needs.

— Abezash