I have been roasting with heatguns for a few months now... and am quite hapy with the process and the results. It gives me instant control... I can see the beans and can judge continuously if the roast is proceeding ok, too fast, too slow, not mixed enough etc.
I roast about a kilo of coffee a week and popcorn poppers, at 100 grams batches, were just too tedious. "Real" home roasters still only do 150 gram batches, and even and Alpenrost, at $800 (Australian) only does 220 grams.
The brief was to roast at least half a kilo batches, but not spend a fortune. For the Yank friends: half a kilo is about 1 pound 2 ounces.
I have had a few experiments, incluing a contraption that agitated the beans that worked ok but only with small amounts of beans.
I am now up to the system described below. It is still based on manual stirring - I am thinking of building a mechanical stirrer, but not sure how to go about it.
Click on the thumbnails to enlarge
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The setup |
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600 grams of green beans in the bowl. 2 basic heatguns ($40 from Bunnings) held above the bowl with portable brackets. | The beans used in this photo-essay are Toad Mountain Masai AA (Kenya). If you are really really interested in this coffee click here. |
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The roasting starts |
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| 1 minute | Ooops - remembered the thermometer | 5 minutes - chaff flying everywhere | |
| Roast completed | |||
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| 6.40 minutes - first crack |
7.30 minutes | 9 minutes - seond crack | 10 minutes - done |
| Cooling | |||
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| My cooling unit - an extractor fan | The extractor fan and sieve | Beans for cooling - the air is drawn through the beans | Light stirring - the beans can be touched in a minute or two |
| Done | |||
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| The roasted beans | Nice color | The roast is reasonably even | 500 grams (18 ounces) batch ready in about 15 minutes | The Result |
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| TLooks pretty good, and tastes ok too | |||