My Stronghold Journey, Part I

This post was not sponsored by Stronghold. I’m genuinely a fan.

The Stronghold S7, an all-electric, vertical-drum 700g roasting machine made in Korea.

I’m in Korea this week, which gave me a really great excuse to drop in on the fine folks at Stronghold, who were hosting a diverse group of international distributors for an eight-day technical training (that I would like to join next time, wink).

If you don’t already know, Stronghold is a coffee roasting machine manufacturer based in Seoul. Their machines are quite unusual compared to traditional drum roasters:

The drum is vertically, rather than horizontally, oriented

They are 100% electric

They have a unique heat source — halogen, in addition to hot air

The first time I saw one I was intrigued by this change in format, and had to know more.

My relationship with Stronghold developed in a roundabout way. My friend Mark Michaelson, formerly of Onyx Coffee, now of US roasting machine manufacturer San Franciscan, introduced me to John Lee, the global sales manager at Stronghold. John was looking for some support for a customer in Portland, and I had the bandwidth to be his consultant. 

Here’s a cute video of Mark and a Stronghold S7 from 5 years ago.

This is how I met Alix Nathan, who owns The Mark Spencer Hotel (among other businesses) in downtown Portland. I got to spend hours and hours in a little closet-sized space in his hotel getting to know a Stronghold S7 Pro. It didn’t take me long to fall in love.

Thanks to Mark Michaelson’s experience and easy way of explaining things, I quickly came up to speed on the machine’s fundamentals and over the next few weeks began to develop some tasty profiles for The Mark Spencer. (My next post will delve further into the profiling capabilities of the Stronghold, so stay tuned).

The machine is delightfully user-friendly.

In fact, this is one of its biggest benefits — you don’t need to be a member of a production team to be involved in the day-to-day roasting of coffee. A user only needs a profile and some green coffee in order to churn out consistent results.

It’s a bit of a game-changer in terms of how a small business owner sources coffee. Instead of buying bags of roasted coffee weekly from a wholesaler, they can source green coffee from any number of small importers, develop profiles on a Stronghold, and supply their own shop’s needs.

This is only possible at this moment in the development of the coffee industry as importers historically only wanted to work with large volume customers. Now, there are dozens of small volume importers in North America who will sell someone as little as one pound of green coffee. Add a Stronghold machine to your offerings, and you’ve got a unique selling proposition.

This is the business model of Roastronix owner Arash Hassanian, based in my hometown of Houston, Texas. For as little as $450 a month, a shop owner can lease a Stronghold. Naturally, Arash will also supply green coffee, but more importantly, support and user training. Thanks to Stronghold Square, the company’s online roasting community, users can also see and share roast profiles with roasters at all levels of experience anywhere on earth.

I spent some time with my friend Phil Kim this week, a Stronghold user here in Seoul. He roasts 700 gram batches for his tiny one-man bakery-cafe (with some part-time help a few days a week) on an S7 that sits in the window. Just a few years ago this business model would have been impossible for him to maintain — the part where he roasts his own coffee, I mean. He would be a wholesale customer of a company like mine, actually.

So, if this concept potentially cuts into sales of wholesale coffee, why do I love it?

It’s attractive to people who are going to roast for themselves anyway, so it gives them a leg up and eliminates a lot of the consistency issues among beginner roasters. At the moment, it seems everybody wants to roast their own. So a concept like Arash’s is poised to satisfy that market.

There are limits, of course. The S7 produces a maximum of 700 grams of roasted coffee per batch. The larger S9 — which is the largest machine Stronghold says they’ll ever make — tops out at about 6.5kg per batch. If a small shop’s demand outpaces its production capacity, it may end up a wholesale customer eventually anyway.

I’m sure they’ll have no problem selling a used Stronghold to the next up-and-comer.

My buddy Phil Kim at his Seoul cafe (sorry, I don’t know the English translation of his cafe’s Korean name, but it’s something to do with hot air balloons).

The machines are really low-maintenance and perform trouble-free for years. I’ve had mine at Building Coffee for four. Minor wear and tear — normal for any production machine — has been the only issue.

Here at Cafe Show I’m told Stronghold will show off a prototype for a sample roaster.

I’ll add it to my wishlist.