Meet the Roasters
Meet Our Vintage Coffee Roasters
Extract Coffee is hand-roasted on vintage coffee roasters, rescued from scrap and lovingly brought back to life through a series of restorations by the Extract Coffee Roasters team. Scroll down to read about all of our roasters and what makes them each unique!
Bertha
120kg | Probat | 1990's
Bertha is our biggest roaster, sitting at an impressive 120kg capacity. It's the heartbeat of our roastery today, but when we found her, she was a pile of parts. Decommissioned in a roastery in Bosnia.
This rebuild took four years to complete. We've transformed this machine into a cleaner, greener coffee roaster.
An afterburner eliminates VOCs from our emissions (meaning cleaner air for Bristol) and this machine now runs 60% more efficiently than when she was first built nearly 30 years ago.
THE STORY OF BERTHA'S RESCUE
Betty
60kg | Probat | 1955
Bertha's older sister. A 1955 vintage Probat roaster named Betty.
When we rescued Betty in 2010 she was in a bad way. After 18 months of hard graft, Betty's restoration was complete and set us on a path to continue rescuing, restoring and rebuilding these beautiful machines.
In 2020 we added an afterburner to clean up her emissions and made further modifications to further improve the consistency and efficiency of Betty's roasts.
We launched a new coffee, Betty Espresso in 2020 celebrating 10 years since Betty's restoration. The coffee launches each year on International Women's Day and champions female coffee growers around the globe.
Betty is now more than 70 years old, but ongoing restoration projects like these will see her stand the test of time (and outlive us all!)
Bernie
15kg | Probat | 1990's
We purchased Bernie as part of a pair, the other twin lives at our London training space, yet to be restored and currently without a name. Originally, they were names the twins as they're identical, but in early 2026 we named this one Bernie.
They're both 15kg vintage Probat roasters and Bernie is the roaster we use for all of our small batch-roasts of our most premium speciality coffees.
James
6kg | Ozturk | 2000's
Our very first roaster, James started as a 10kg Ozturk. We've modified and restored this machine many times over the years, changing the roaster from convection to conduction and modifying the skin to make the roast more consistent. These changes mean his roasting capacity is now closer to 6kg.
Originally bright red, he was named after the little red engine in Thomas The Tank Engine. James was a staple in our business for many years, roasting our delicious single-origin coffees. He's now retired from roasting, sitting in the corner of our wholesale training room in our roastery.
