Man vs Machine Roastery

At Man versus Machine, the roastery is where everything starts.

Based in Munich, Maxvorstadt, our roastery is home to the people, equipment and processes behind the coffee we serve across our cafés and send to coffee shops and wholesale partners around the world. It is where green coffee arrives, where we spend our days tasting and roasting, and where we turn the coffees we select into the finished product that carries the MVSM name.

Our production roaster is a Loring Kestrel 35 kg. The Loring gives us the control and consistency we need to roast coffees from very different origins, varieties and processing methods, while its design also allows us to roast efficiently and with a relatively clean environmental footprint.

But the machine is only part of the process.

Good roasting starts long before the coffee goes into the hopper. We spend a lot of time tasting green coffee, roasting samples, developing profiles and comparing coffees before deciding how they should be roasted. Once a coffee is in production, we continue to taste and adjust rather than simply relying on a profile that worked previously.

This is important to us because no two coffees are the same. A washed Ethiopian coffee might need a completely different approach to a natural coffee from Brazil, while a highly processed experimental lot may require something else entirely.

The roastery is therefore not simply a production facility. It is a place for experimentation, refinement and constant learning.

Our cafés and roastery are closely connected, too. The coffees we roast need to work in the real world. They need to be enjoyable when prepared by a barista, at home on a filter brewer, as an espresso or simply as a good cup of coffee. We want the coffees we roast to be interesting enough to reward attention, but never so complicated that you need a flavour wheel and a degree in coffee to enjoy them.

Ultimately, the roastery exists to do one thing: get the best possible cup from the green coffee we have chosen.