Clean up is zero issue. Every 3-4 months I used to run an empty cycle and then give it a quick wipe down with a cloth and some kitchen surface cleaner but now we don’t bother. I think the last time I cleaned it, aside from giving the outer shell a quick wipe, was probably a year ago.
Emptying it is easy, too. Just take the cage out, shake it over the rubbish bin to get any remaining chaff off it, tip the cage into the canister, take the chaff tray out, tip that into the compost bin, give it a quick vacuum with a cheap stick vac we keep in the kitchen and then put it away.
I’m definitely a bit surprised that we haven’t seen more low-end or DIY roasting machines become available.
It’s something that I wasn’t worried about spending a bit of money on because when you’re doing larger batches anything going wrong gets expensive quickly. We’re paying NZ$23/kg (US$6.5/lb I guess?) so if a 1lb batch goes wrong, that’s a pretty decent chunk of what the machine itself cost us.
I’m not entirely sure the Behmor is a ‘great’ roaster, but we quite like it. I think the main thing people complain about is the relatively slow cycle time, taking about 20 minutes for us to roast to midway between 1st and 2nd crack. Also people complain that you can’t roast dark but we’ve done plenty well into 2nd crack. In our case we wanted to roast our own not only for saving money but also to get a better selection of single origin coffees available, so that naturally means roasting lighter as time goes on, anyway. No sense taking a nice floral coffee through to 2nd crack where you’re losing all of the delicate notes and replacing them with something that could just as easily be a 50% robusta blend, in my opinion
I hear you. I am kind of liking the lighter roasts. I roasted some Ethiopian recently that had a description of lemon taste to it. After the 1st 24 hours you could really taste the lemon. After 3 days it had smoothed out & the lemon was a lot more muted. I had the opposite with an India roast which I don’t think I have had India coffee beans before. It had slightly spicy notes the 1st day & then 3 days later, it tasted like I had put cayenne pepper in it.
The Behmor 2000AB is the roaster I keep coming back to & it is about the upper limit of what I would buy one for. Easy cleanup is a very good selling point for me. It is half the price of the Breville espresso machine I bought & then sent back because of a defect.
Have you checked to see if there are any 2nd hand ones available? It seems like the type of thing that people might get gifted and not want, or get sick of and move on pretty frequently. Or upgrade out of as well, I guess. I sold my old one (that still worked ~90% of the time) for a couple hundred NZ$ to someone who wanted to use it as a base to modify further. Even if it has issues, you could manually control the thing with a few switches and a high powered dimmer and get good results… I just needed to replace it with something that my fiance was able to get out of the cupboard and run successfully herself.
Not that I’m trying to dissuade you from the DIY route, I wish I’d followed through on my various DIY roaster plans! I was trying to figure out how to make a drum roaster. I was going to heat it via a modified induction hob and get feedback from drum temp and bean mass temp but never got beyond buying a cheap benchtop induction hob to experiment with.
I’m not familiar with the Behmor but looks like a good machine. Some of my family have the Gene Carafe and seem to like it. The cool down process on it seems to be a little slow so it continues roasting after the shutoff is hit. And it is a bit more expensive.
Yeah, we just live with the cooldown time on the Behmor but I’ve seen people just open the door and even take the basket out to dump it in a cooling tray. That does result in chaff going everywhere so we don’t bother.
Like I said above, I don’t know that I’d say it’s a particularly ‘great’ roaster, but we’ve been super happy with ours and do pretty much 1lb every 5 days at the moment. When I was working from home we were going through much more coffee and so I bought an entire 65kg sack of Yirga Cheffe. That lasted us 18 months in the end because I worked overseas for 6 months immediately after buying it But I’d say we’re at around 30kg/65lb a year through the Behmor at the moment?
Is that because of the price? The Behmor is one of the cheaper options, especially for a larger capacity roaster.
Here I can buy top quality green beans for $23/kg but roasted cost ~$50/kg for ‘decent’ or $35/kg for unknown supermarket beans that may have been roasted months ago. I think our home roasting falls somewhere between the two of those options.
You lose around 10% by weight to water evaporation so $23/kg of green beans becomes $25/kg of roasted beans. Compared to the supermarket cost we’re saving $10/kg and getting a better quality. Compared to the local roasters we’re saving $25/kg for what is a minimal reduction in quality, to my palate, anyway.
A Behmor roaster is $800 in NZ so it pays for itself somewhere between 32kg and 80kg of coffee. That’s 1-2 years for our usage (4 espressos per day normally, 6 some days, 22g dose).
Our first Behmor lasted a bit short of a decade and I think we tallied up that it had been through almost 400kg of coffee in that time.
That reminds me of when we bought the espresso machine. We were going out for espressos once per week and just making a single pot of drip each day during the week (actually more like 2 cups each, not even a whole pot).
We did the math and figured even an expensive machine would pay for itself in months to a few years.
But when we got it, we made espresso every day and then went out for coffee on the weekends and we didn’t save any money.
We each make one espresso everyday. Some days we have a second. I would like to get into roasting mostly because I drink decaf now and it is hard to get decent decaf whole beans without paying an arm and a leg. $500 is low enough I could get into that hobby. So is a heat gun, a flour sifter, and an esp32.
How would the behmor handle the cold? If I got one, I was thinking of roasting it in the shed in the winter or outside the shed. I don’t want to smell up the house with it & our stove vent hood does not duct to the outside.
Yeah, very similar story! In my case there’s no chance I would have developed a flat white habit without buying an espresso machine so I think of having the machine as saving us money but the reality is definitely somewhat murkier. My fiance was buying coffees before and after work so at the very least it’s 50% saving, 50% question mark.
The availability of decent decaf beans was a huge issue last time I looked into it. In my case I haven’t been able to find a good source of green decaf so maybe check on that first, that could put a bit of a dent in plans.
There are a ton of methods that work really well. If you’ve already got the heat gun the dogbowl method seems to be a great option. The popcorn popper approach is super simple as well but the small batch sizes mean most people seem to move on from that quite quickly. Whatever it is, I’d say keeping the initial investment low and knowing that you’ll move on helps. Coffee is getting expensive enough that there’s value to having a more reliable method, especially if you start wanting to deal with larger batches to avoid spending an hour or more a week roasting stuff with a popcorn popper.
I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. I’m in New Zealand so ‘cold’ for us is ~15°C, 60°F in the kitchen. We usually start with the windows closed and then open them for the final 10 minutes of roasting and 5 minutes of cooldown. You do get a bit of an acrid smell from the process but not enough that it has worried us. If I’m doing it I’ll sit the machine on the windowsill so that at least most of the smoke goes outside. I was considering making a ‘hood’ to sit over it with a fan and short extraction hose that can be slung out the window. That’s probably the approach I’d take if I were in a really cold climate: An extraction system to outside that can be run temporarily. You’re only really talking 25 minutes to run the roast and cooling cycle so that might work out ok?
During winter we definitely see the roasting process taking an extra minute or so compared to when it’s 25°C/80°F so the cold will definitely affect it more than something where airflow is less important like a drum roaster/conduction style machine.
The solution to that is potentially just lowering the quantity a little as it starts to cool. We tend to run 1lb batches regardless of the temperature outside but the machine runs noticeably faster with smaller batches.
We have a couple of coffee trees in our house that have fruited for a few years now. I’ve tried feeding the cherries to our cats but they remain stubbornly uninterested. Probably for the better…
Have any of you tried Dark Horse Coffee? They are out of San Diego and Kauai. Their coffee has a unique flavor that I really enjoy. They are the only coffee roasters that I have found who do a fermented coffee bean. Fermenting the coffee beans and roasting them at home would be a very cool DIY project.
But I’d say we’re at around 30kg/65lb a year through the Behmor at the moment?
