What I've found with this product is a lot of potential for control of the roast, which was one item I was looking for when searching for a roaster. Another item was price, and I believe this unit delivers for the cost. The last main item is the roast quality, and I've been easily able to produce very consistent and even roasts with this product.
This is more of a personal roaster, so don't be planning on serving huge amounts of coffee to guests. About 4 oz of green coffee at a time is the limit. Once you've filled the roaster with beans per directions and have the feel of the process, I've found you can eyeball the amount of beans going in by using the silver ring around the glass container.
I use a high fan speed at the outset with a low temp until the beans agitate easily and have lost significant moisture. I then use combinations of lower fan speed and the medium or highest temp to achieve the roast I'm looking for. As the roast progresses, the fan speed is still important to keep the beans agitating nicely, but not so agitated that the roast temperature would go too low. When going into "cool" mode, I run the fan speed back up to the maximum speed if possible, to help remove any additional chaff from the roasted beans and to cool the beans as quickly as possible. I've found with lighter weight beans, I cannot go to the maximum fan speed because the beans themselves will be carried into the chaff collector. This is worth putting into your notes as something to take into account for the different beans being roasted.
To note: Agitating the beans nicely means that the beans you can see next to the glass continue in a fairly even downward movement and disappear. If you find sections or areas where this does not occur, with some beans seeming to sit in place or even sit too long compared to others, the beans are not agitating properly.
Concerning the timer, I find the 5.9 minutes to be too short for roasts I am looking for. As this machine is a fully hands on machine to make it work properly, I believe a much higher default here would have been much better because you're going to end up hitting the cool button manually when you've achieved the roast level you want. The timer for me functions mainly as a guide if you do any timed operations or need a timed "heads up" during the process. With this machine I think that the current implementation of the timer is more of an obstacle that you must always work around.
Cleaning the chaff collector is pretty easy using a soft dry cloth to gently move out the chaff. A soft brush from a hardware store would work nicely as well.
The machine is quiet enough to easily hear the 1st and 2nd cracks going on with beans I've used so far.
No comments:
Post a Comment