The Loring roaster, seen from the cafe side of the glass.

Behind the Scenes in the Roastery

August 27, 2026

Our roastery sits in a remodeled Bank of America in the middle of downtown Morro Bay. The roaster is behind glass in full view of the cafe, which allows our customers to see the process beginning to end. If you want to see how your coffee is made, please join us sometime in Morro Bay for a coffee.

It starts with the green coffee

We buy in the top one percent of specialty green coffee, and never compromise on quality. That decision happens long before anything gets roasted, and it is the one that matters most. No amount of skill on the roaster rescues a mediocre coffee, but you can really bring amazing coffees to life by roasting properly.

Green coffee in the hopper, weighed out by lot. — Green coffee in the roaster. Most batches are 50-65lbs depending on the density and roast profile.

Green coffee lined up in Brute containers — Batches weighed out and lined up, waiting their turn.

The Loring Kestrel 35 Kilo

Most roasters put an open flame directly against a spinning drum. The Loring does not. It uses a single burner and recirculates clean, hot air through the drum, then uses that same burner to incinerate the smoke produced during roasting. The hot stack can reach temperatures around 1,500 degrees, making the Loring one of the cleanest and most efficient coffee roasters on the market.

The result is a roasting system that is incredibly responsive, easy to make subtle adjustments on, and very repeatable from batch to batch. We’ve spent a lot of time roasting coffee on both traditional drum roasters and Lorings, and for us, the Loring can’t be beat. It’s significantly more efficient, easier to use, is made in the USA, and most importantly, produces amazing coffee.

Two operators and the full machine. — It only requires one operator for most production, but helps to bring the crew together when profiling new coffees.

Every batch is logged as it runs. — Every batch is logged as it runs, with temperature data every 4 seconds from multiple temperature probes. Every batch is logged and saved, and we have tens of thousands of batches in saved data. This ensures consistency.

Repeatability is the whole job

Roasting well once is not that difficult once you understand the machine and the ins and outs of how coffee reacts in the process. Roasting the same coffee the same way in February and again in September, on a different lot, in different weather, with changing moisture content, which can be the difficult part. We roast meticulously on state of the art software and equipment, which gets us to near perfect replication on every roast.

The drop

At the end of the roast the batch drops into the cooling tray and the arms start turning. Cooling fast matters. The coffee carries enough residual heat to keep roasting itself, so the faster it comes down, the closer the finished coffee is to where it was dropped.

Roasted coffee dropping into the cooling tray. — Roasted coffee dropping into the cooling tray where a very powerful fan pulls air through the intentionally narrow cooling tray and up the cool air stack on the left side.

Then it goes next door

Everything we bag is coffee we serve here at Scout. Scout Coffee has been serving HoneyCo Coffee in San Luis Obispo for over 12 years, and Alton Brown called it scientifically perfect when visiting our Foothill location years back. Our cafes have also been written up by the New York Times, The Guardian, The Venue Report, Sunset Magazine, and many others.

The cafe counter in Morro Bay. — The cafe bar in Morro Bay.

The roastery is visible from the cafe tables.

Bags on the shelf, a few steps from where they were roasted.

Come see it

We are a few blocks from the water. Order a coffee and house made pastry, sit where you can see the roaster, and enjoy the show.

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