Check out my new roadster!

I've been worried for a while.

You might remember that I had a hot air coffee roaster die a couple of years ago. According to Sweet Maria's, hot air roasters have a warranty for a year and that if they are well cared for they will last a couple of years.

A dead coffee roaster is not a good thing.

As I said, I've been using my roaster for more than two years. Last fall I was thinking that I'd better take action since I don't want to be without my coffee. Sweet Maria's said that the manufacturer of the roaster I was using (well, the manufacturers of all hot air roasters) had put production of their roasters on hold. The manufacture kept pushing back the time they'd be reintroducing the roasters. They're now saying they'll be ready at the end of 2010 or early in 2011.

So much for preventative action.

In the past few months the roaster has been making sounds like it is under stress. Coffee roasting makes a lot of dust and oily residue that clogs vents and gums up bearings. And its sounds of struggling seemed to be getting worse. I'm afraid it is very near the end of its life. And replacements aren't available.

I was getting very worried.

There are other hot air roasters available that have smaller capacities than my roaster handles. But I've been thinking that roasting every other day was a little too often. That maybe I need a roaster with a larger capacity.

Replacements of my roaster aren't available. Even if they were, I'd still be bound to the roaster a little more frequently that I want to be.

If only there were a roaster available with a larger capacity.

Meet The Roadster:

It's a Hottop Drum Coffee Roaster (basic model). It roasts in a rotating drum. It's quiet. (Hot air roasters are LOUD!) It roasts 250 grams of green coffee. The old hot air roaster did 150 grams. If anything wears out, it can be repaired. If anything in the hot air roaster's base wears out, you buy a new roaster. (I did have to get replacement roasting chambers for the hot air roasters. But it's the base with all the moving parts that was about to die and that would mean the end of that roaster.)

I couldn't make a movie of it in action. I needed to pay attention to what it was up to. Maybe later you'll get to see it running.

For its first roasting I just let it run through its "Auto" program. It churned the beans and the temperature rose and rose. It turns out that I needed to tell it to turn down the heat. It got up to the target temperature while the first crack was still going and it dumped the beans into the cooling tray. I wanted to go at least to Full City Roast or Full City Roast+. I have to use it and learn how to adjust it to get the roasts I'm after.

That's part of the fun of home roasting.

Why "Roadster"? Well, the day it came I sent Jerry a text message apologizing for not stopping at the grocery store to pick up some milk. I told him that I had a coffee roaster with me that I needed to get home and play with it. The phone is a smart phone and it helps people by correcting spelling errors. I watch the keyboard to see that it is entering the letters I want. I don't look at the part of the display where it shows what it's going to send. That's where it will make choices for you when it doesn't like the word you've entered. Sometimes it isn't terribly smart. I usually don't proofread what I've typed since I had done that while I typed.

It changed "roaster" to "roadster." So that is the machine's name.

It turns out that the New York Times's technology blogger had recently done a post where the perils of smart phones' autocorrection feature are shown. I'm not alone.