Coffee Roaster Comments Update

Most of a year ago, I posted on a friend's Blog about Home Coffee Roasters. At the time, My flat bed roaster was in the process of going belly up, and I was experimenting with a new iRoast 2 machine from HearthWare.

It's several months later, and I can now report the the IRoast is a much better machine than then previous Hearthware coffee roasters that I have owned. The electronics are much better and much better shieled, and as a result it is much more durable.

I've replaced a couple of plastic pieces (as a result of my dropping them) but the electronic base / heater is still going strong.

Due to the volume of coffee that I roast for the office, I've now purchased a second iRoast2.

My only complaint is that it is too sophisticated for the programming interface that it has. There are only a couple of buttons, and as a result custom programming is an error prone and tedious process.

That's a pain, but it is generally a one time pain, since you don't program it again once you have the roast profiles you want stored in the bases non-volatile memory. So, Again, I give this a big thumbs up. The original Hearthware roasters worked well for a brief period of time, but the electronics were not protected from the units own heat well enough and they tended to have very short lives. Hearthware seems to have fixed this problem with the IRoast 2 version.

Tags: coffee, home roasting