A Secondhand Roaster, a Family Rift and a Detour Through the Dutch Countryside

A Sunday Ritual in the Back Room

Drop into Parlor Coffee on any given Sunday and there is a good chance David Billings will be in the rear of the space, leaning over a restored 1965 Probat, adjusting and testing his way toward the ideal roast. A machine that old almost certainly carries its share of history. But the story Parlor's owner, Dillon Edwards, tells belongs to the roastery itself.

Chasing a UG-22 Across the Atlantic

The setting was this spring, with Parlor moving ever nearer to launching its roastery in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. To track down a vintage Probat UG-22, Edwards went through a friend who had once worked alongside him at Bonanza Coffee in Berlin. Edwards sent his last payment for the roaster through Reus, then settled in to wait. And wait. Eventually, having grown tired of never getting the estimated arrival date confirmed, he decided to handle the matter personally.

"I had to do was literally buy a plane ticket two months later, fly to Amsterdam and drive around the Dutch countryside to the border of Germany"

That is how Edwards describes it: purchasing a ticket at short notice, flying to Amsterdam, and motoring through the Dutch countryside toward the German border. Accompanied by some friends from Bonanza, he combed the German-Dutch border region for the machine until the group located it in a shop in Holland, intact and set to be shipped.

A Seller Outside the Fold

As Edwards puts it, the deeper he dug, the more complicated the picture became — much like any good story. In his words, the man who sold them the roaster was something of the black sheep of the Probat family, effectively cut off from the company. Peter von Gimborn's great-grandfather founded the business that grew into Probat, and his father had at one time served as managing director.

Peter's own firm, Kaffeetechnik, handles distribution and servicing of Probats, yet it never carried the same prestige as Probat itself. Rene Macaulay, a roaster at People's Coffee in New Zealand, wrote on a blog about prying their UG-22 out of von Gimborn's "cold, arrogant hands." Probat had granted Kaffeetechnik exclusive distribution rights, but ended the arrangement in 2006, in part over "his behavior towards customers and business partners," according to marketing manager Jens Roelefs.

Stuck in Holland

In Edwards's case, Kaffeetechnik had set up the purchase of the used UG-22 and farmed out the refurbishment and customization to a Dutch workshop. That shop then declined to hand over the roaster, contending that von Gimborn still owed payment for the service. Edwards explains the situation guardedly: "Essentially we had to force Peter to settle his debts—maybe not force but encourage Peter to settle his debts," he says, "and ultimately get our roaster on a boat." When I phoned von Gimborn in Germany, further complications surfaced. He maintained that routing communication through the friend had added to the delays, and that the Dutch shop he originally paid had subcontracted the work to a second shop, which then sought payment from von Gimborn — leaving the machine idling in the Dutch countryside until von Gimborn paid a second time.

Across the Water and Back at Work

In the end the Probat made the crossing to North America and was roasting coffee once more by June. Such machines were once left in barns, hardly worth the expense of hauling them off for scrap. Today they command a hefty price.