Blah, Blah, Blahg: Again, with the roasting

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Again, with the roasting

I successfully roasted a couple of batches of coffee in the hot air popcorn popper, and really enjoyed making that all come together. Then I got a great offer. Our friends who encouraged us to roast our own (see previous post) got a new fancy roaster, and said we could have their old one. Nice.

They came over for a great visit and dinner, and a lesson on what was now, our new roaster. I roasted a few batches, which worked quite well, but the beans required quite a bit of attention to keep them in motion. I thought that ideally the whole process should be hands free, and that perhaps over the years of use, the roaster's performance had diminished.

Perhaps I could fix that.

So, here are a few pictures of what I did. And so as not to keep you in suspense...

Yes, I got it back together. And, yes it works. And,yes the beans spin the way I hoped they would.

The roaster relies on hot air being pushed by a fan, through the beans, and out through a vent (with some of that hot air returning to the roasting chamber)

Those passage ways have mesh screens (to catch the chaff) which over the years of enthusiastic use, had become clogged with chaff and coffee oils.

And the fan motor chamber had quite a bit of build up too. Probably a layer of very fine chaff. It was not very dense, but I could see that it was probably significantly impeeding airflow.