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ne of San Franciscan CEO Bill Kennedy's favorite quotes
comes from his decades as a middle school principal in
California. Recalling his favorite gi from a student, a glass
apple with a short story accompanying it, he says, "People love
a story."
Love a story we do, and the story of San Franciscan is
compelling, stretching from the fertile mind of a mechanical
genius who worked his way around the world for years on oil rigs
to the excitement, dust and countless prototypes found in the San
Franciscan manufactory deep in the craggy Nevada desert.
With an unrelenting focus on solving roasting problems
with simplicity and elegance, with an aesthetic drawn from
1890-1910-era ligature, and with an exploding following
of coee roasters from around the world, San Franciscan
is poised to enable the creativity and passion of the coee
industry moving forward.
FIRST, A LITTLE BACKGROUND
Sherman Dodd liked to say he was a "roads scholar," since
he'd learned everything he knew on the roads. e peripatetic
genius stumbled into a job with Probat in his 40s and quickly
learned a massive amount about the mechanical side of coee
roasters. No one could deny his brilliance, but it wasn't many
years before he came to odds with his employers and le with
a two-week paycheck, determined to do his own thing.
At that time, in the 80s, there wasn't an American roaster
manufacturer delivering a product like Probat, so Sherman
used his contacts to take delivery of shipping containers full of
roasters in various stages of dilapidation from Europe—Gothots,
Petroncininis, Samiacs, Probats—and cobbling them together
with 60 hz motors for the American market under the Coee/
PER (Coee Processing Equipment and Repair) company name.
He learned what he loved and hated about each roaster, and
READY TO ROAST
18-20 ready to roast SCR0414.indd 18 4/4/2014 7:34:46 AM
