The Week the Roaster Broke
Small business is such a wild ride. We feel it every single day—but we try not to talk about our problems here. Our goal has always been to solve your problems, not tell you about ours. So, week after week, we quietly fix the broken bits and replace stolen bits behind the scenes, usually under the cover of night.
But this week? This one deserves a story.
Short version: we accidentally roasted about 30 pounds of a customer favorite, a natural Guji, darker than usual. It’s not our typical profile, but it’s delightful—especially as espresso or cold brew. You can grab a bag [link here].
Long version:
Joe was roasting coffee as usual—batch after batch, smooth and steady—when a sudden, loud grinding sound filled the room. He dropped the coffee out of the roaster like always, the agitator arm started spinning… but the cooling fan did not.
He grabbed a nearby box fan, prayed a little, and aimed it at the cooling tray.
If you’ve ever baked cookies, you know: if they sit on a hot tray too long, they keep baking. Coffee’s the same way. Once it’s roasted, the temperature needs to drop quickly. This batch cooled slower than we’d like, so it continued roasting even out of the drum.
And just like that, our repair saga began.
Our beloved Genio roaster—manufactured in South Africa—was down.
Earlier this year, we hired our friend, Codey, part-time to help with repairs and maintenance. He and my husband Luke are kindred spirits—both grew up fixing cars and working on all kinds of random projects. Between their know-how and YouTube, there’s hardly a problem they can’t solve.
By Friday, they’d ordered a replacement motor from Illinois. We had fulfilled every wholesale order and had a fair back stock of coffee for our own shops. But the motor still hadn't come by Tuesday as expected.
We still have our old cooling fan from our 10k Mill City roaster in storage, but it’s only about one-third the size, so we had to dramatically decrease our batches for it to work. Codey and Luke rigged up a temporary system for the roasting team: one person roasting, another sprinting to the electrical panel every ten minutes to flip the auxiliary fan. Two box fans blasted from above. It wasn’t pretty—but it worked.
By Wednesday night, we were running on fumes. I woke up at 3 a.m. to check on the baby and shook Luke awake after. “We need at least three backup plans,” I said. “In case the new motor doesn’t show—or doesn’t work when it does.”
We’d already pulled from our own shop inventory all week to fulfill wholesale orders, but supplies were running low. The weekend was coming.
At 5AM, I texted our importer, Brian. We had an order of green coffee set to ship from Kansas City the next day. When we visited their warehouse last year, he showed us a very large roaster they keep on hand for emergencies. This felt like it counted.
Only one person on their team is trained to use it, and we had a small window for it to arrive before Saturday. I jumped on the phone with their owner, Jon, who gave us the green light and connected me with Russell to share roast profiles and graphs. It felt a little like leaving your kids with a new babysitter for the first time—but I knew he was qualified.
Meanwhile, Luke started researching what it would take to fix the old motor. That was always the plan—to have it as a backup eventually.
Finally, the replacement motor arrived—delivered to Codey’s apartment Thursday instead of the shop two days earlier—but he came in holding it high over his head like a trophy. We all cheered.
Then came the bad news: our Genio uses a metric motor. The new one had a ⅞ standard shaft, not the 16mm we needed. Everything on the spec sheet was identical, but that one difference—continent to continent—wasn’t listed. It didn’t fit. It never would.
Codey packed up both motors and headed to a local manufacturer in search of help. Luke scoured the internet for welders—the kind who could handle a weird, one-off repair. Most shops were too big, too polished. But then he found this 5-star review that stopped him:
“We had a piece of farm equipment break. He got it fixed within 30 minutes and we were back in the field!”
That was it. Luke called. Jimmy from Judd Performance Welding answered, asked a few questions, and said, “How fast can you get here?”
Off Luke went—dropped it off, then hustled back to Highlander to train two new baristas.
Jimmy welded the motor shaft—better than before.
By 5:30PM, Codey and Luke had reinstalled it. The roaster was alive again.
Joe—who had been roasting 18-pound batches all day with the switch-flip-and-fan-hold technique—started running the full 50-pound batches we know and love. He worked a 14-hour day to get every single-origin roasted and packaged for delivery the next morning.
At 8:36AM the next day, Anthem Coffee Imports delivered pallets of green coffee—plus 600 pounds of roasted Benchmark components for us to blend and package. Shay, Brady, and Fran jumped in to help package and deliver.
Every order still went out. Every customer got their coffee.
And we were reminded all over again that small business is just people — showing up for each other, one wild week at a time.
