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All this talk of home-roasters and roasting in one’s very own kitchen has got me waxing nostalgic. And so I dug around the roasting bench in the garage and excavated my very first coffee roaster — the FreshRoast — and after a bit of dusting and inspecting to make sure that all was in apparent working order, I started roasting coffee. The neurotic golden retriever — a creature who’s memory is clearly better than I’ve had any reason to believe — ran for cover. Fortunately (at least so far as the dog is concerned) while I did fill the house with the aroma of roasting coffee, I did not set off the smoke alarms. Honestly, when you’re roasting about 2 ounces of coffee at a time, you’d have to really throw yourself into it and put some serious dark on those beans to create a lot of smoke. (more…)

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In Vermont, it’s said, there’s nine months of winter and three months’ rough sledding. While that’s fine for skiing and snowmobiling and such, it can put a real damper on the aspirations of the dedicated home coffee roaster, banished to the garage or the wide open spaces beyond after that incident with the dark-roast batch that triggered the smoke alarms at midnight.

It’s little surprise, then, that home roasters everywhere — in wintry places, especially — find themselves drawn like so many moths to the flame of a coffee roaster due to hit retailers soon… the Behmor 1600. Its spec sheet is promising: batches of up to one pound, a number of programmed roast profiles and the ability to tweak them on-the-fly at roast-time, quiet operation so you can hear the audible cues of roast progression, and built-in smoke abatement technology. (more…)

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