Coffee Roaster

A number of months ago, due to the fact that my coffee roaster was getting less and less effective, I switched to an air popcorn popper instead. I thought that the fan must be dying on my roaster, because it wasn’t circulating the air well enough.

The coffee roasted in the air popper wasn’t as good, due to the fact that the roasting time was too fast (at least in the summertime) and there was no control over the temperature or time at each temperature. Basically the roasting curve was completely based on the current temperature, wind conditions, and whether or not I had the lid on.Today, as I was roasting, the fan stopped working on the popper. It would still get plenty hot, but no circulation of the coffee beans. I tried briefly to take it apart, but it had three screws that required a triangular driver, so into the trash it went.I turned back to my coffee roaster, cleaned it up a little bit, and tried it out. It worked even worse than I remembered. On a whim, when the cooling cycle was running, and the coffee was circulating very poorly even with the fan at full speed, I removed the lid. Immediately the coffee started circulating almost too well. Violently in fact. Encouraged by this new development, I decided that the lid must be dirtier than it looked and was blocking airflow. I could feel plenty of air coming out the top of the roaster, but evidently it was plugged in some areas.I inspected the lid more closely. To save myself the words to describe it, here’s a picture of the underside of the lid:After closer inspection, I realized that the holes around the perimeter were somewhat clogged with coffee oils and fragments stuck together by those oils. I used a toothpick to clean those out. The other problem (both of these problems are probably related to not cleaning it often and thoroughly enough) was that the mesh portions were both rather blocked at the ends. The problem was that it was worse than it looked, because the residual oils were actually keeping more air from coming through than what it looked like it would. I discovered this partly because, when I was scrubbing it with soap and a toothbrush, when I flipped it over suds were only coming through part of the mesh.The short version is that it works! I now have my high quality roaster back, and all it took was a little cleaning. My first pot of coffee from that roaster was the best I’ve had in a long time. Here’s to good coffee!