On the road...

... in A Dog House on Wheels.

Roasting took a hit starting in 2009 when we got our first RV. We were reduced to buying roasted beans form Starbucks (Verona, either regular or decaf,  is still a great choice!). After traveling all summer we would head back to Santa Fe in the early fall and I'd get back to roasting. And I'd make sure we had some extra when we started out the next season.

I don't roast while I'm on the road- power is always limited and roasters use a lot of it. There are purists that roast their beans in a cast iron skillet over a fire but I just don't have that skill level. Besides, it's so easy to get Verona!

After we got a lifetime lease for an RV lot in an RV park in southeast Arizona (SKP Saguaro Co-op) in 2013, we found we spent less and less time in Santa Fe. So we decided to sell the Santa Fe house and commit to having only our RV as our only home in Benson. The 5th wheel went away in favor of a 'destination trailer' (closer to a travel trailer than to a mobile home), plus we added a travel trailer for use during the travel season. It worked OK as far as RVing was concerned but I wasn't able to roast. We just didn't have room for 2 BBQs at our site.

After a couple outdated batches of Starbucks beans (yuk!), I did some poking on the internet for a  compact way to roast my own beans. Sweet Maria's to the rescue! I saw several choices but was already pretty satisfied with using a drum for roasting. There are a few electric drum roasters to choose from and I settled on the HotTop for no other reason than it had an easy computer interface and there was free software that supported it (at that time there was also Gene Cafe or a Behmor).

The HotTop is actually a fairly well conceived small-batch roaster. My only whine is the drum is indirectly heated. A small Calrod heating element radiates the upper left quadrant of the drum, heating the thin-wall stainless steel drum. Because the drum is thin stainless steel, it responds fairly well but there is a noticeable lag: first the Calrod has to heat up to the new setting, then the heated Calrod has to warm the stainless drum. Takes time.

The HotTop comes with 3 time-based roasting profiles built into the firmware. These profiles are modifiable by the user to vary the power level, adjust fan speed, and the temperature when you dump the beans. It incorporates 2 temperature probes that provide the instrumentation for roasting- one thermocouple probe is placed at the likely center of the bean mass (hence the fixed batch size of 250 gm) and the other thermocouple is outside the bean mass at the top of the roast chamber ('Environment Temperature'),

I started making changes to the profile after the first roast and saved those changes in the HotTop as a modified profile. That worked pretty slick till I made an error in one of the profiles and discovered there's no way to go back to the as-delivered configuration. Hmmm... that's -1 for Mr. HotTop.

After a few roasts I downloaded the free Artisan roasting software. The importers of the HotTop had contributed $$$ to Artisan's developer to port the s/w to the HotTop. Very smart move. Now I had the same roasting control of the HotTop plus I also had a graph of the roast process. Things were looking good at this point and I'd have probably continued till the HotTop finally died of natural causes. The issue was that I was limited by the 250 gm maximum batch size. And it uses a couple activated charcoal filters as part of its smoke control... and they can be $$ if you want to roast a lot.

I turned out some decent coffee with the HotTop. And most importantly learned not all coffee has to be roasted to second crack! And I discovered that I love gesha coffee varieties from Guatemala and that Ethiopian coffee will continue to taste incredibly good as it cools.