Hottop Home Roasting Machine KN8828-P
As mentioned in my previous post, we have today taken delivery of a Hottop Home Roasting Machine (KN8828-P).
This machine was purchased from UK company “Has Bean” following a discussion with Sarah (the owner of Has Bean).
Initially we had decided upon the Café Gene Coffee Roaster, but decided to push to boat out and purchase the Hottop KN8828-P instead.
The mostly stainless steel Hottop certainly looks the business. In fact, it wouldn’t look out of place behind the counter of your local coffee shop.
The roaster comes fully assembled and only needs the bean chute cover to be inserted.
We also purchased a 2Kg bag of Celebes Toraja Kalosi green beans. Sarah kindly sent 250g samples of Sumatra Lingtong, Toba Sulawesi Espresso Brand and The Breakfat Bomb beans too.
The reason we purchased a 2Kg bag of the Celebes was so that we had sufficient beans of the same batch to try various settings on the roasting machine without introducing different beans for different settings which wouldn’t have given comparable results.
The first attempt at roasting coffee beans with the Hottop didn’t exactly go to plan!
Keen to get going we quickly skimmed through the excellent manual supplied with the roaster and decided to use the “Auto” mode to start with. In Auto mode you still have control over the roast time, but everything else is taken care of by the machine. More experienced users will probably end up with their own roasting “recipies” which can be saved as programmes within the machine and easily recalled.
So we switched on the machine, selected Auto, confirmed the default roasting time of 18 minutes and started the machine going.
The first stage if for the roaster to get up to temperature (this take place BEFORE adding the green beans). When the machine is up to temperature a beep is heard and the on-screen display indicated that it’s time to add the beans.
We added the beans and watched them rotate around the internal drum as the display showed the internal temperature continue to rise. The machine quickly started to make a grinding sound as the drum rotated. Having not used a coffee roaster before we didn’t know if this was just caused by parts of the machine expanding as the temperature rose.
A minute later and the grinding was getting louder, and on close inspection of the rotating drum we could see that the drum wasn’t rotating smoothly - on each rotation there was a slight pause as if the drum was getting stuck. Seconds later there was a louder grinding sound the drum stopped rotating. Thinking this wasn’t right we pressed the Back/Eject button to abort the roasting process. This ejected the beans to the cooling tray below.
We allowed the machine to cool down and started again. This time the drum didn’t rotate at all during the pre-heat process so we aborted straight away.
Time for a quick call to Sarah at Has Bean. I explained the problem and Sarah said she would get Stephen to phone me once he had finished the current roasting he was working on.
We decided to take the machine apart (a process required to clean it anyway, so we weren’t invalidating the warranty) just in case we could see what the problem was. There was no obvious problem so we re-assembled the machine.
Waiting for the call back from Stephen we decided to give it one more go, using the same 250g of green beans we used for the first roasting attempt. This was a mistake, but more of this later.
This time the drum rotated properly and the grinding sound had gone. Perhaps something got dislodged slightly during transit.
So we were on our way; the beans changed color during the process as time passed and the temperature rose. The “first crack” of the beans arrived as expected, followed by the “second crack”. A quick look at the timer showed a few minutes left as the beans darkened and smoke stared escaping from the machine. This was expected, but not quite the amout that was actually generated - more than enough to set off two smoke alarms spread over two floors!
At the end of the process the beans were ejected and the result was a very dark roast (some would even say burnt) and a very oily coating. We then realised that the first aborted roasting attempt had already roasted the beans for a few minutes so we should ideally have thrown the batch away, or at least reduced the roasting time for the second attempt. Well they say you learn from your mistakes!
On reading the manual in more detail it does actually suggest throwing the green beand away if you have to abort the roasting process. Having had to open all windows and doors to get rid of the smoke just generated, we would quite agree!
So lesson learnt, we let the machine cool down, ready to try again with the benefit of our new found knowledge.
We will bring you details of the next roasting soon.