Green Coffee Buying Club
Coffee Discussion boards => Hardware & Equipment => Topic started by: nimbus on February 22, 2009, 10:26:50 PM
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He lives in Thailand and asked me about this roaster:
"Hey, is this roaster worth $40 second hand?
http://www.breworganic.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=760"
I know nothing about it. Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Sideways?
He's a total newbie, and I'm really not sure what is available there...(Chiang Mai)
Thanks for any feedback...
Nimbus
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I actually started roasting darn near 10 years ago with a Freshroast. It's a decent little air roaster and it's good for a beginner. I haven't used mine in a long time, but the issues I had with it were it's small batch size and it's tendancy to roast too quickly. I know it has been upgraded since I bought mine (It's now call the Freshroast +8), but I think the main issues are still there. I believe MP and BW both have and roast with these occasionally. Check out THIS LINK (http://www.sweetmarias.com/prod.freshroast.shtml) for more information.
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Indeed I do have one. It certainly is not a Hottop but is a great roaster for the money. The heat does start high and stays there until the beans are roasted. For $40.00 IMHO he cannot go far wrong.
Hope that helps.
:)
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I have gone through 3 of these - gave away two, kept the first one for posterity... A Poppery 1 is much better. You can do well with a FR8+ if you split wire it and use a variac to control the heat. Otherwise the first and second cracks will overlap. If you like charbux-style coffee, it works great right out of the box - you can go from green to French in about 6 minutes and the beans don't get properly dried so there is a lot of extra hydrolysis and creation of tannins. Another option for an improved profile is to roast with a much smaller batch than recommended, to reduce bean-to-bean contact and increase the amount of time to roast - about 50g seems to work well if you have the internal potentiometer that controls the fan at full bore.