Customer Reviews

Fresh Beans Coffee Roaster, 2 1/2 oz in 7 minutes

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I purchased this roaster, the FreshRoast Plus, a little over a year ago. In that year I used it roughly every two days and after a bit of a rough start had no problem getting just the roast I wanted. Thats not to say that you can just turn the dial and get the same roast each time. Slightly different amounts of beans or different types could require 2 to 3 minutes less to roast often because the first crack was so exothermic that it caused a very rapid second crack. Still, with some experience and good timing the variables were easy to adjust for.

Unfortunately, just days after the 1 year warranty expired, the fan on the roaster started making strange noises and a couple roasts later a small flame shot through the center of the roaster. I will be buying a different brand as a replacement. Only being able to get a year's worth of roasting and risking a major fire in the process more than outweigh the initial savings.

I received the Fresh Roast Plus 8 as a 30th birthday present from my parents, which has allowed me to take my coffee snobbery to an entirely new level! This model has worked admirably in the 2+ months I've had it, roasting one batch at least every two days. It's not automatic (there isn't a good roaster that is) and you need to carefuly monitor color, aroma, and "cracks" to achieve a consistent roast, but the coffee it produces is balanced, consistent, and far and away better than anything you can buy in the store.

The negatives are that it does feel a mite flimsy: the glass roasting chamber sits precariously on the fan unit and could easily be knocked off and broken. Also, it only roasts a few ounces at a time -- perfect if you just want to roast enough for your morning cup, but don't expect to be able to roast half or entire pounds of coffee for gifts. The smoke is pervasive, so it's helpful to roast the beans under your stovetop exhaust fan, lest you set off the smoke alarm.

Overall, this is an excellent product for the home roaster who's just getting into the world of coffee roasting. Should the interest take hold a little more, it would be wise to upgrade to a larger capacity table-top drum roaster, or a used commercial machine.

My passion for an ever better cup of coffee inspired me to purchase this machine. Warning: once you master the basics, and it's not difficult, all other coffee will pale by comparison. This is primarily because coffee loses much of it's flavor three days after roasting. You will be able to purchase green coffee suited to your tastes, and roast according to your consumption. Now for the nitty gritty:

Pros:

Inexpensive. In this price range, you have your choice between this machine or a modified corn popper (don't bother), a few hundred dollars for a slightly better arrangement featuring an agitating auger and catalytic converter to handle the smoke, or several hundred+ for a drum unit. For less than 100 bucks you can produce coffee every bit as good, with a few caveats.

Easy to use. Load the hopper, put the lid on, crank the knob, and in about 7 minutes you have roasted coffee.

Cons:

Build quality is poor. My unit is about 10 months old. It looks like it's been in use for over 10 years. I roast enough beans for two pots of coffee every other day. The heat from the element has cracked the base and warped the lid. The fan wheezes. The glass carafe, which sits precariously over the heating element, is cracked from an unfortunate topple-over. The chaff collecting lid also suffered the loss of a hefty chunk of its rim from this incident. My point is that the whole concoction is so unstable that it is not a question of IF you will one day unwittingly knock it over but WHEN. In spite of the injuries, mine still works enough for me to coax my daily grind out of it. I will either buy another soon to replace this one or bite the bullet and get a drum unit.

Small batch limitation = lots of free time spent roasting coffee. You will be so thrilled at the quality and taste of your first roasted beans. Then you will realize that to support even modest coffee consumption, it will seem like you are roasting constantly. Worse yet, you will read in the manual that the machine must "completely cool" between roasts. It is not meant for "serial roasting" you see. You can push it, and roast again after say, ten minutes - ok maybe 5 minutes - because you just want to go back inside and watch Project Runway or something; but that will likely accelerate the cracked base effect noted above. So let's break down the time required for tomorrow morning's coffee nirvana, which will require 4 ½ cups of water and 10 rounded tablespoons of ground coffee:

1. Choose beans to roast from green coffee library (Guatemala Acatenango Buena Vista Gesha) - 2 minutes
2. Measure two scoops into the roasting chamber - 30 sec
3. Turn knob and roast - 6 minutes on average
4. Dump beans and cool down - 1 minute
5. Wait for machine to cool 20 minutes
6. Repeat steps 2 through 4 - 7.5 minutes
7. Total time invested = 35 minutes. Add another batch and you've killed an hour for just over a day's worth of coffee.

Machine runs too fast and too hot. There is no way to control the fan speed or temperature of the roasting chamber. What this means to you is that the timer on the knob is effectively useless. Air roasters roast very quickly (a good thing because, you will be roasting every free minute of the freaking day) Not to worry, you will get the hang of it and I list instructions for great results.

Recommended supplemental equipment:

Home Coffee Roasting, Revised, Updated Edition: Romance and Revival by Kenneth Davids. A great intro and overview of turning beans from green to brown.

A high temperature, long reach thermometer: I dare say this is a must have. Once you can see the temp in there things get a LOT easier

Screen colander. To dump the hot roasted beans in.

Flash light. Optional. A pen light will let you see the smoke and get a better visual sense on the beans in the chamber

Simple spray mister: to quench the beans when you dump them out. Cuts the smoke and the faster you cool them the better for the flavor of the bean

Shop vac. Not essential, but the best darn way to cool beans fast.

An Aeropress to make the best coffee possible with the beans you've lovingly roasted. Do yourself a favor and buy one of these, you will not regret it.

Instructions:

Optional but highly recommended: drill a hole dead center in the lid and pop in your thermometer. Use the clip to set the tip about 2" from the bottom of the chamber.

1. Get some high quality beans. Try on-line resources like Sweet Maria's. Don't skimp, buy the best beans avialable and experiment with different varieties to determine what characteristics you like best.
You really should roast outside unless it's below 60. If inside, under a running range hood will work. The "open window" routine some suggest only blows the smoke IN, unless you open a door or another window to create a cross draft...
2. Measure in two scant cups of beans with the included measuring cup. Though you will want to, do not push it and overload with rounded cups. I know, it's meager.
3. Look at your beans. Are they large, honkin Nicaraguan Limoncillo beans, or tiny peaberries from Costa Rica? The large ones will take nearly the full clock, while the tiny peaberries will be done crazy fast, so be ready
4. Put the lid on, preferably with the thermometer
5. Crank the timer all the way up to the end. Do not bother trying to time it. All beans are different. Even the same beans will roast longer/shorter depending on the ambient air temp.
6. The beans should begin agitating. If they don't, I carefully lift the machine and give it a few shakes until the beans start to lose moisture and move on their own
7. Wait for "first crack". You won't miss this, it's fairly loud. If you have a thermo installed, it will be about 380-415 depending on the bean and environmental variables and amount of chaff produced.
8. After first crack comes second crack. You want to stop just before that, or maybe a few snaps into second crack at most. If you have no thermo, you'll have to listen for it. It sounds like crinkling paper. If you are watching with your pen light (not visible otherwise), you will see a lot of smoke starting to develop. This is a good clue to stop. Going too deep into second crack burns the oils and hence the flavor of the bean. Stop anytime past first and before second crack and you will be just fine.

A note on the thermo: don't expect to get cracks and degrees of roast as per the tables in the books. It's all relative. On my machine I get a perfect Full City roast by killing it at 450, which is a little high by the book. Try a little higher/lower till you get results you like and stick with that. Just be aware that a tiny peaberry type bean can be done from start to finish in 4 minutes, proceeding directly from first to second crack, giving you very little time to react. With a small bean, or beans that produce a lot of chaff, the thermometer is indispensible to prevent over roasting.

9. Turn the knob to off, carefully remove the blistering hot lid and dump the beans into your colander.
10. Give them a shake and spray them with your mister a few times. Shake and spay again. Don't go crazy with the spraying. It should all vaporize and not stay wet. If you have the shop vac handy, a quick pass of the hose under the colander will cool them lickety split. Otherwise, set them aside until they are room temp.
11. Look at them. They should be nice and brown, almost dry looking. A few spots of oil dewing through here and there means you nailed a perfect "Full City" roast.
12. Put them in an air tight jar. You can roast them right away, which will not disappoint, but they will be the best with a 12-24 hour rest. Some beans, like Yemen, are best after a 72hr rest.
13. Brew and enjoy. Try the Aeropress to elevate your experience yet higher!

If you're considering purchasing this unit, you should wait. New models (FreshRoast SR 300 and SR 500) from this company will be ready for sale in January, 2010. The SR 500 has better temperature and fan speed control and both of these models should address a design flaw that the FreshRoast +8 has where the top surface of the base unit cracks during the 1min cooling cycle or shortly after the unit has been used.

Except for the design flaw, I'd say that overall, this is a good starter unit and a great way to get comfortable with figuring out the logistics of roasting at home, but frankly, it's little more than an air popper. That said, it still has some real advantages over doing the air popper method. Namely, effective chafe collection (good enough for me to easily take them to the compost), being able to easily watch the color of the beans (which is important for knowing when you want to stop) and the built in cooling cycle (which *helps* *prevent* the beans from continuing to roast, and possibly over-roast, from the residual heat in the beans and glass of the chamber).

*REMEMBER* after you've roasted your beans, they're releasing CO2 for the next 12-24+ hours. Let them rest before you seal them away in your preferred container. The longest I've let mine rest to date is 18hrs and it has, by far and away, resulted in the best tasting cup I've made yet.

I just went through my second one of these and each of them only lasted one year with weekly use. I would roast the two ounces at a time, fifteen minutes apart, until I had a weeks worth--about a pound once a week. I've done the same thing previously with a corn popper that I bought at the thrift store for 3 dollars, and three of them have also only lasted one year. I bought the Fresh Roast in hopes that it would last longer than the one year that a used corn popper works, but it didn't. Considering that the Fresh Roast roaster can't be had for less than about 80 dollars, the corn popper is a much better deal.

I bought our Fresh Roast plus 8 about two and a half years ago, and although I find using it tedious and sometimes unpredictable, I can't complain about its durability. We roast a batch every night and make 12 cups in the morning, and although it has cracks in the housing and the chaff basket has broken several times (and been crazy glued back together) the damned thing is still going strong. After two years its roast times seemed to be slowing down, so I took it apart and cleaned the chaff out that had been sucked into its intake, and that cured it. Then I called the guy who imports them from China He answered the phone himself and gave me considered advice (compare to customer service for the iroast2) and despite its low batch size and attention deficit disorder (you have to pay complete attention to it for it to work) it's still working well enough that I haven't been able to justify a better one. If you're rich, buy a fancy one. If you're not, get this one. It works, it's affordable, and it lasts.

I've had two of this product and really the only reason I bought the second one is I got a good low price. The machine is poorly made and the timer and the settings is a joke. The first machine burned up when the timer did not shut off. I'd recommend watching it carefully. My first machine lasted two years and that was infrequent use at that. I fully expect the second machine to last no more than the first because, if anything, it is worst made than the first.

In the likely event you don't live within several hours of a professional Coffee Roastery like Starbucks, the Freshroast Plus Eight is the next best thing.

As any coffee connoisseur knows, if coffee beans are more than 3 or 4 hours out of the roaster, the resulting brew is practically undrinkable, fit either for the trash or the unwashed masses. Likewise you must drench the beans with pressurized boiling water within 10 seconds after grinding, or the main coffee essences evaporate.

Do it right, and you're not just drinking a cup of coffee... you're cupping a cup of coffee, in the terminology of the coffee cognoscenti, the exclusive group that is the only one who knows how to properly enjoy coffee. I don't even know why other people bother consuming the wretched dregs they make, which hardly ever are drunk at the recommended 200 degrees.

Freshroast ups its already considerable game (i love that turn of phrase) by adding two extra minutes on the roast cycle. Previously only six minutes were available, and if you wanted to go past six to reach the rich, toasty, dark, blackened bean state that real experts adore, there was not a single thing you could do. Now you can crank the timer dial right over to eight. My dream is that one day, Freshroast will make machine that goes to eleven. To actually accomplish an 11 minute roast I use two machines. After the first 8 minute roast ends, I quickly transfer the beans over into an already warmed-up second machine set to 3 minutes. Voila, 11 minutes.

It recently came to my attention that Freshroast has discontinued this particular model. I don't understand why they did it, but I can't say I don't like it. This way, I'm likely to remain the only person I know able to intelligently make a cup of coffee. Go ahead, drink your so-called coffee. I'll be CUPPING mine.

I got this roaster a number of years ago, used it quite a while, then got busy and just bought roasted coffee. Recently my partner uncovered it and we began using it again. Just a bit of experimentation gives a perfectly fine roast. We like our coffee very dark, and we're very happy with the flavor.

Only drawbacks are:

(1) The small quantity of coffee we can roast at one time, which is just enough for 2 people for one day. When it's time to replace this, I'll be looking for something that can handle a quarter to a half pound at once.

(2) This cannot be used in my home, it just generates too much smoke. Fortunately we have a detached garage and use it there.

I would not buy this coffee roaster. I first purchased one a year ago, and the whole base cracked down the middle within 6 months. It was nearly impossible to get the manufacturer (Fresh Beans, Inc.) to honor the warranty, but it reluctantly shipped out a new model (after accusing me of "abusing" the machine). The second unit never worked properly, and I had to work through the Better Business Bureau to try and receive a refund. The manufacturer told the BBB they would refund my money. I returned the unit, and I am still waiting for my refund (it's been 5 months!).