I have been roasting for years using a spinny popper. After wearing out several Whirley Pops, I got the Sweet Marias stainless roaster. It died yesterday after a few years of use and I don’t think I can fix it.

Obviously I can purchase another one. But I have always wanted a “real” roaster but I don’t want some expensive, el cheapo beginner thing.

I roast a couple pounds at a time every few weeks so I’m not exactly a heavy user. I definitely do not nerd out on the minutiae of roasting. Probably because the spinny thing doesn’t really allow for appreciable tweaking. I roast in the garage using a propane stove

It is hit or miss if I can pull off a light roast and it’s is super easy for a roast to get away from me and go dark AF. For the most part, all my roasts turn out well enough for me and others seem to enjoy it. Sometimes, a roast finishes and I ask myself WTF happened.

I can financially afford an Allio Bullet but IDK if it is just far more machine that I need. Any recommendations from the experts on a direction for me?

Been taking a break from roasting to work on my gardening game. First cherries developing nicely.

Here are some picks from a coffee farm tour I went on in Kigali, Rwanda. Totally a lifetime experience for me! I was even able to contact a local seller and buy 4 kgs of some top-quality beans!! We were not able to roast the beans we harvested, but we did process them for drying out. We were given beans that had already been dried to roast. Went from harvesting the coffee to brewing directly from the farm. Again, an experience of a lifetime!!

(5 lbs purchases)

I just started roasting coffee, been selling it at farmers markets. I’ve had some people ask if I could grind the beans for them, I currently only sell them whole. I saw there is an attachment for a kitchen aid mixer. I was wondering if anyone has used one and what your thoughts on it is.

I've been bothering Jason and Bryce over there for a couple months now as I impatiently waited for it to be ready. Until now there have been literally no choices for prosumer fluid bed roasters that will do between 500g-2 pound batches, they're either all tiny 150-250g sample roasters or big commercial units sized for someone selling coffee for a living. Hopefully it arrives soon!! Came in at just under 4 grand with the Hermetheus CoPilot automation and the exhaust blower motor, so a few hundred less than an Aillio Bullet R2 with about the same capacity, but in a fluid bed not a drum roaster.

Hello, I came across a 2018 Sweet Coffee Italia 2kg Gemma coffee roaster. From what I gather they are most commonly used in cafes in Europe. I can't find a whole lot of info on these units. What I have found is positive the most part. Anyone here have any experience with these roasters?

Thanks

here is the beginning of a complete tear down and rebuild of a Probat GG90 roaster. i have a small imgur gallery, but will add more. this machine is vintage 1960s and has been roasting millions of pounds for us over the past 28 years. in this rebuild, we remove the drum and re-machine the leading edge, install a new new-from-factory faceplate, extend the rear drum shaft, replace the old gear reduction with a new Nord drive, repalce the fan with a new new york blower, replace all the electrical controls and add custom afterburner software/hardware. this is essentially a new machine.

there’s a ton of subtlety in this rebuild and some macro-fun at the machinists, with a giant lathe (and a big drill center to boot).

please comment—i need some motivation to create the full gallery and detail all the stuff.

https://imgur.com/gallery/probat-gg90-rebuild-LuOWEkQ

I lost power last night right in the middle of a roast on my Bullet. Drum stopped. Lights out. Exhaust fan stopped. Smoke started.

I couldn't get the beans out because the drum wasn't rotating. No rotation means no drop, and I was fumbling in the dark trying to figure out what was even happening. Luckily I had a laptop to drive Roastime or I would have been in a pitch black garage with a pending fire. The smoke got bad fast.

What i finally was able to do after much swearing, I grabbed the power cord and found a different outlet on a different breaker, luckily it had a GFCI with a light on and it was within reach of the roaster. Got power back, drum started spinning again, finished cooling the beans. Ruined roast, but not a fire. Turns out it was a popped breaker because I was trickle charging a car battery and roasting on the same breaker, 3 roasts without issue, the forth popped the breaker.

In the chaos it took longer than I'd like to admit to figure out how to prevent a pending fire in the drum.

Lessons I'm taking from it:

• Know in advance which outlets in your roast space are on different breakers. I did not know this before last night.
• Practice your emergency steps before you need them. I had no plan and it showed.
• Make sure you have a fire extinguisher nearby, I didn't.
• Don't roast in a space where a power loss leaves you completely blind.

Posting this mostly because I've seen a lot of posts about dialing in profiles and defects but not much about what happens when things go sideways fast. It can get bad quickly.

Surprisingly, the beans were not terribly charred, still ruined. RIP Ethiopia Dogo Sudo

We are expanding our small licensed home roasting business so we are having more inventory and packaging on hand. Any advice for the best way to organize and store the empty packing bags? Any other organization suggestions for beans, labels, etc?

"I started home roasting three months ago and I am genuinely enjoying the learning process even when the results are inconsistent in ways I do not fully understand yet.

What I have started realizing recently is that my grinder situation is probably hiding information that would help me understand my roasts better. I have been using a basic blade grinder because I had not prioritized upgrading it yet.

Someone in a roasting forum explained something that changed how I understood the problem. Grind consistency affects extraction so significantly that tasting a coffee and learning anything useful about the roast profile requires removing grind inconsistency as a variable first. My blade grinder was introducing so much particle size variation that I was essentially cupping noise rather than the coffee.

I started looking into coffee grinder parts and burr replacement options as a route to upgrading my existing setup before buying something new entirely. The burr condition in a grinder affects particle size distribution in ways that degrade gradually enough to go unnoticed if you are not paying attention to it specifically.

The adjustment mechanism matters as much as the burrs for getting repeatable grind settings between sessions, which becomes important when you are trying to compare roasts across different days.

A more experienced home roaster I connected with online said assessing grinder quality reminded him of a conversation he had read in a specialty coffee forum where someone described researching grinder burr specifications across platforms including online shopping sites,where the gap between claimed and actual burr geometry had generated a surprisingly technical discussion about how tolerances affected grind distribution curves.

What equipment upgrade most improved your ability to actually learn from your roasts?"