Highlighting the coffee industry's increasing emphasis on sustainability, the Specialty Coffee Association presented its Best New Product Award 2023 for the P05 hydrogen roaster, launched by Probat last autumn. The award, presented in June at the World of Coffee 2023 show in Athens, recognizes innovation and value in the category of "Commercial Coffee Preparation and Serving Equipment."
The award panel, comprising SCA board members and staff, voted unanimously to pick the Probat machine, a shop roaster that is first commercially available unit to use hydrogen as the source of fuel for heating.
"I am really happy that the importance of our innovative hydrogen technology for the green transformation of the coffee industry has been underlined once again with this award," said Thomas Koziorowski, chief technology officer of the equipment maker, based in Emmerich, Germany.
Koziorowski's team began experimenting with hydrogen systems in 2020, and by the time the resulting product was launched in September 2022, global prices for natural gas had spiked, driven by repercussions of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This increased the appeal of hydrogen as an alternative fuel by reducing the cost difference.
Probat is developing a full line of hydrogen-powered machines, and the company can retrofit gas-fired units. It says that the machines are comparable to gas-fired units in investment cost. The taste of coffee roasted using hydrogen is the same as with natural gas or electricity, Koziorowski said.
The main benefit is lower emissions since combustion of hydrogen produces only water vapor, as Koziorowski told STiR in January,
"The emissions that would normally come from combustion of natural gas are entirely absent when burning hydrogen. So, emissions like volatile organic compounds and carbon dioxide are lower. In the case of CO2, it would be 10% to 20% lower than with natural gas. There are emissions that come directly from the coffee itself, which would be the same for both systems, since that has nothing to do with the type of fuel."
For more information, see https://www.probat.com/en/