Coffee Roasters for the ultimate brew!

Coffee roasting is a procedure where a chemical process takes place where the acids, aromatics and other flavors are balanced, created or changed in a manner that they augment the overall flavor and taste of the coffee. The ultimate in coffee enjoyment is roasting the beans you use rather than buying in pre-roasted.  However it takes more time, effort and of course there's a cost associated with it. There are several manufacturers of such roasting machines in the market and we'll have a look at a couple here.

While choosing the roaster, some problems that arise include how much coffee you need and what is your budget to buy the roasting machine in the first place. You wouldn't want to have, for example, 3 days supply of roasted coffee beans stacked up as that defeats the main purpose behind self roasting i.e. to enjoy a beverage made from freshly roasted coffee. As far as price is concerned, usually the more a coffee roaster can roast at a time, the more costly it is.

It is also important to know that there are different types of roasters available. The small home roasters are basically based on an "air popper" design most of the time. These are the fluid bed makers that use hot air for roasting and moving coffee. The perfect time range for these to roast the coffee is between 8 and 12 minutes. On the other hand, the large units like the ones by HotTop, Gene Café or Behmor are the drum machines that offer slow roast along lines of manual methods. The roast time for these machines is around 14 to 20 minutes or more.

Some Nesco coffee roasters  are fitted with a smoke reducer that is a huge benefit in some ways but it means that the roast time will be longer as a faster roast overwhelms the converter. In case you love a dark coffee roast, you need to decrease the overall batch size and experiment a bit, make some adjustments, to use a Nesco coffee roaster.

Then there are Behmor roasters available that also feature smoke reduction technology and has little visible smoke. But these tend to be large machines that are only really necessary if you need to roast a number of coffee flavors for a huge number of people.

Have a look at several machines and decide which one will meet your needs for capacity, if you need smoke reduction or not and of course if they'll fit within your budget.