May 04 2009
Behmor baby
Upon hearing that a buddy of mine, whom I turned onto home roasting, went out and bought himself a fancy schmancy Hot top coffee roaster, I just could not wait any longer. I went ahead and cashed in a few hundred thousand shares of GM stock that I had laying around and bought me a 300 dollar Behmor Roaster from Sweet Marias. Now, my girlfriend does not have to hear me yammering on about how much I want one. While, Behmor is not as fancy (or schmancy) as the Hot Top, it seems to have quite a following in the homeroasting community. Also, this highly regarded machine is capable of cooking up a to a full pound of coffee beans, which is almost double that of Hot Tops 9 oz capacity.This gives me the ability to produce more than three times the roasted coffee in one sitting than I can with my Nesco.
And Perhaps I went a little overboard during my first two days. Just a little.
Within two days, I was up to my elbows in beans having roasted three 8oz batches within that span. The first two were from the eight pounds that SM included with the machine and turned out pretty good, but then I went got and too bold. I decided it was time to try some of my precious Tanzanian in this baby. I set it to 8 oz and the P3 setting. They started cracking 12 minutes and 20 seconds into the 14 minute roast and were still going as the count down began prompting me to add 30 seconds to the time.
Something told me that they were not finished, and I had not heard them hit the second crack when the cooling cycle kicked in, but being a little weary of starting a fire in my new machine, I hesitated on adding more time. The beans came out too light and the resulting coffee ended up being too bright and lacking any of the delicious caramel like undertones of slightly darker roast of the bean.
