Too Much Coffee

Looking at getting a roaster now ... one concern is the amount of smoke produced ?

I currently dont have a good extractor fan in the kitchen and dont particulary want to spend my evenings in the shed.

So are any machines better than others for getting rid of the smoke, or are the all much of a muchness ..... and how much smoke exactly is there, in a scale of 1- 10

1= she will hardly notice you are roasting coffee
10= really p1ss the other half off and you are sleeping on the sofa IF your sleeping at all !

If you don't have a relatively efficient extractor you will not be happy with any of the commonly available home roasters. Watching the videos on Youtube you may be able to get away with the Behmor, particularly if you don't go too far into second crack. I don't think the Behmor is available outside of the US yet, but is supposed to be relatively soon. A few members here have some experience with the Behmor and perhaps they can make some more accurate reports on smoke levels.

I get an immense amount of pleasure out of home roasting, so if it's something you're interested in, I can thoroughly recommend it. I started out with an iRoast, but quickly progressed to the Hottop and haven't looked back.

As far as smoke goes you definitely don't want to be using a Hottop indoors without any provision for smoke extraction. I think doing so would easily rate a 10 on your 1-10 scale.

Like you, spending time in a freezing shed in the depths of winter is not my idea of fun, so I came up with a little (ok big) invention to help extract the smoke so I could roast indoors. This has been a total success to the extent that you would never even know it had been used, so would score no.1 on your scale. My extractor has three speeds, and the lowest one is more that enough to extract everything.

I assume this also helps with consistency since, in a house with central heating, the ambient temperate is going to be pretty much the same regardless if it's summer or winter.

Anyway I hope this encourages you to give it a go.

The Gene cafe is available with a large filter box to which a pipe can be connected to vent the smoke to the outside world. Clean, cheap(ish) and simple.

cheers for the info.

Looks like I need to get the extractor fan sorted first then .. Nice setup Puck :thumbs:

johnny wrote:
Looks like I need to get the extractor fan sorted first

If you can find a way of getting the roaster linked to the extractor it will have the benefit of enabling you to run the fan at slower speeds, This will keep the noise down so you can still hear the cracks.
Extraction can create a lot of noise at high levels!