An easy-to-use roaster that can keep you in supply of fresh roasted coffee.
Positive Product Points
It is simple and easy to use and does a good job roasting coffee, although it may roast the coffee faster than is optimum. The clear glass chamber lets you keep a good watch on the roasting progress letting you move the dial to the "cool" portion of the cycle when you decide the roast has reached the stage you want. Clean up is simple.
The unit is small and doesn't take up much storage space between uses. It's nice looking and could be left on the counter, but we store ours in a cabinet.
Negative Product Points
The base of the roasting chamber is plastic and does not stand up well. When assembled for roasting, the roasting chamber and chaff collector are not very stable.
Beans sometimes get caught in the upper part of the roasting chamber, leading to uneven uniformity in the roasted beans.
Detailed Commentary
We stepped up to this roaster from a corn popper, and it is a big improvement over the popper. The capacity is somewhat small for households that consume a lot of coffee, but it works fine for us, because one batch of regular and one batch of decaf is enough for about five days at a time, so the coffee is always fresh.
The biggest drawback is that the base of the chamber is plastic and has not held up well under the heat. Ours recently cracked after about 8 months of use - making about two to three batches a week. We intend to call the manufacturer about this to see about getting a replacement but haven't so far.
A second fairly serious drawback is that occaisionally (about every third batch) coffee beans get stuck in the section where the glass chamber meets the chaff collector. When this happens, the coffee that's stuck up there doesn't roast as fast as that which is not stuck, so the resulting batch is roasted unevenly. This probably affects the air flow too, causing the temperature in the roasting chamber to get hotter than it should. The coffee beans will become unstuck with a light tap on the chaff collector, but this requires attention while roasting to make sure the beans aren't sticking.
Despite its drawbacks we are very pleased with the roaster especially considering its fairly modest cost.
Buying Experience
We bought it over the internet from Sweet Maria's (along with their coffee sampler) and had no problems whatsoever.
