Italian Roaster Manufacturer STA Impianti Unveils the RBL 15

The STA Impianto RBL 15 coffee roaster. All photos courtesy of STA Impianti.

Italian industrial roasting equipment manufacturer STA Impianti has launched the RBL 15, the first in a new line of roasting machines from the company designed to attract interest from the specialty coffee market.

According to the 41-year-old Bologna-based company, the new machine offers technical features not available in other STA machines, including a display that shows gas pressure and total consumption in real time, an inverter to adjust and control the speed of the drum rotation at multiple stages of the cycle, and built-in software to set and save optimal roast parameters.

STA’s business has primarily grown on the popularity of its large industrial roasting systems and associated production roasting equipment. However, the company does offer 500-gram and 1-kilo gas roasters in its Little Roasters line. Additionally, STA’s ReRoast line offers machines with capacities of 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 kilos.

While the company does not have formal distribution in the United States, its used machines have sporadically popped up on U.S. soil. Notably, Seattle-based roaster and retailer Caffé Umbria imported a new 30-kilo roaster and associated equipment from STA when it opened its Chicago roastery in 2017.

STA said its new RBL 15 is designed with customization in mind for roasters seeking consistency despite disparate batch sizes, whether for production roasting or for sample roasting and profile translation to larger machines. The company said a recent collaboration with the northern Italian roasting company Griso resulted in a customized RBL 15 that maintains consistency in batch capacities from 2 to 19 kilos.

Though STA has already sold RBL 15s to numerous smaller Italian roasters, the machine does not yet have a published price.