Need advice for my bro'

[nimbus]

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

[thejavaman]

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 for more information.

[mp]

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.

 

[ButtWhiskers]

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.