In this episode, we fire up our newly acquired Gene Cafe CBR-101 Home Coffee Roaster and we roast our very first batch of green coffee beans! We put the small home roaster to work roasting about a half pound of Colombia Supremo “La Valle Verde” green beans. And of course, as we were waiting for the beans to go through the roasting process, we enjoyed a couple beers along the way.
Highlights & Takeaways
Don’t roast coffee inside, unless you’ve got an exhaust system setup!
What we mentioned on during this show
Episode 29 Transcript
Brendan Hanson: Welcome to the Drips & Draughts Podcast. As always, I’m Brendan Hanson. Today, Cary and I are going to be roasting coffee in studio. Never done it, first time. It should be fun, it should be interesting. As we fumble our way through roasting coffee or learning how to roast, I guess I should say since we’ve never done it, we’re also going to be enjoying some beers today. We’ve got a wide assortment of Firestone beers that we’ll be enjoying throughout this process. If you’ve listened before, you know that when Cary and I are in studio recording a podcast, we always have a beer, at least one beer.
Before we get into this episode, I’ve got a review to read. We haven’t received any recent reviews, at least in the past week, so I’m going to just take a minute to plea and ask you. If you’re listening to this podcast, if you listen on iTunes, take just a second to hop in, rate us and review us. Leave a quick review, let us know what you think, let us know if we’ve helped you out. It helps the show so just get in there and do it. It’s not hard. This review comes from iPad level 30, the title is “Awesome Podcast” and it’s a five-star review. The review says, “So glad you’ve made this podcast. All the info you’ve given has really helped us change up our process for nitrogenating our cold brew. Looking forward to picking up a brewer in the near future. Looks much more user friendly than other processes that we’ve used. Many of the guests have shared awesome knowledge for scaling cold brew programs that we will soon implement into what we do.
The future of cold brew is going to be big and now is the time to get in. Now is the time to get educated and Drips & Draughts is really helping push the sharing of knowledge.” Thank you, iPad level 30. What does that even mean? Does that mean you’re just a master of using the iPad? I could speculate all night, but I’m not going to because that would just be awful. Thanks again for the five-star review. Again, if you’re listening to this show, if you get any value from it, we would appreciate if you would hop into iTunes and just take a minute, leave a quick review. Enough of that. Let’s put this Gene Café CBR-101 to the test. We were able to procure this home roaster from Speedwell Coffee. Big thank you to Speedwell Coffee for making this happen. Let’s get to roasting some coffee.
Brendan: Welcome back to the Drips & Draughts Podcast. As always, I’m Brendan Hanson. Cary’s in studio with me today.
Cary: I’m back.
Brendan: It’s going to be a fun day. We’re drinking beers and we’re going to be roasting coffee for the first time.
Cary: This is interesting. We got this new machine and excited to test it out.
Brendan: Going to give it a whirl, take some videos, take some pictures, put them up on the show notes for this and see how it goes. This is our first time roasting coffee, neither of us have any experience in roasting coffee.
Cary: We drink a heck of a lot of coffee and I can’t believe we’ve never tried this before.
Brendan: Not even in a pan on the stove because I know we’ve got a couple friends who roast coffee. I’ve never tried it. This should be fun, this should be interesting and–
Cary: We got five pounds of green beans and we’re ready to mess some up and hopefully-
Brendan: Half pound at a time, right?
[laughter]
Cary: –hopefully not too many but we’ll see.
Brendan: First time roasting, so there will definitely be some mistakes made. If you hear us use any improper terminology, let us know. Email us, send us tweet. We will make mistakes today. I’m sure of it.
Brendan: We’ve got a Gene Café CBR-101, or a ‘Genay’ Café.
Cary: I’m not sure how you say that. The Café has that little accent mark on the e.
Brendan: Yes, it’s got the tilde on there.
Cary: Gene or ‘Genee’ does not– so I’m not sure.
[laughter]
Brendan: The Gene Café, the ‘Genee’ Café, we’re going to give it a go. To give you guys a little background if you haven’t seen this thing, it’s about a half pound roaster, it’s got a small footprint.
Cary: It’s really.
Brendan: It’s probably smaller than one cubic foot. The measurements that we pulled from the website were 10 inches tall, 15 inches wide, by nine inches deep.
Cary: Yes, pretty small. Very cool design though.
Brendan: Yes, it’s definitely not a–
Cary: Such a really well-built piece of equipment.
Brendan: Definitely. Solid. It’s got some cool features so we’ll read through a list of the features. The description of the machine as in the product manual and on the website says, “The Gene Café CBR-101 is designed to be used as a household coffee roaster. It incorporates state-of-the-art design, the highest quality materials, and expert workmanship. Our Genesis technology simplifies and automates the coffee roasting process, making it easy for coffee lovers to produce fresh great tasting coffee at home.”
Cary: It is pretty cool. There’s a digital display on the front of it, and two dials, so you can set your time, set your temperature and it’s just super easy.
Brendan: After flipping through this product manual a little bit, it looks like you can roast automatically. You dial in your time and your temperature and it goes through the whole process, once it hits its time and temp, it starts the cool down process. I think you can also do it manually. You basically let it go and whenever you’re done, you tell it to start cooling down.
Cary: Cool.
Brendan: To go through a couple features of this thing, it’s got a removable chamber, which we’ve got out on the table here, holds about a half pound of coffee, well-built glass chamber with a–
Cary: Clear glass cylinder so you can see the beans changing colors as they roast and stuff.
Brendan: It says it makes filling, emptying, cleaning easy and convenient. We hope so. It’s got automatic temperature control, which we’re looking forward to using, automatic timer–
Cary: Yes, since we know nothing about temp or time needed.
[laughter]
Brendan: It’s got automatic cooldown, it’s got overheat protection, which is probably good for us since we’re doing this in our office. I think our landlord would appreciate that.
Cary: Yes. [laughs]
Brendan: It’s got a high-efficiency chaff collector. Chaff is a term I actually looked up last night just to find out what that was. It’s got innovative 3D agitation. When that chamber goes in there, it goes in at an angle. I guess that helps agitate the beans. Sleek Euro style design.
Cary: I’ll say.
Brendan: I’d say so.
Cary: [laughs]
Brendan: I would drive that down the street. It’s got a clear roasting chamber. Unlike some roasters, it says it’s got a clear chamber plus the safety cover so you can check in on the roasting process. What else does it got? Convective heating, large-capacity chamber, even though it only holds about a half pound. I guess that’s large capacity for a home roaster.
Cary: Probably. I think when I brew a pot of coffee in the morning, I’m not using anywhere near a half pound, right? On a daily basis?
Brendan: I doubt it. If you do, you’ve got problems.
[laughter]
Cary: I’m going through a full pot myself, yes.
Brendan: It’s got quiet operation. We’ll see if we can actually do this while we’re recording or if it’s too loud to continue recording. We’ll find out. That’s about it.
Cary: Get going on it?
Brendan: Yes, let’s go ahead and fill that chamber up. Cary’s going to do that while I drink beer and I guess narrate the process. We’ve got a five-pound bag of green Colombia Supremo beans.
Cary: I’ve never smelled green beans before but I expected somewhat a coffee smell out of these things. Actually they just kind of smell, I don’t really know how to describe, kind of musty or dusty little bit. [laughs] I just smell them all over.
Brendan: Rumba. Yes, they do just smell like being out in the field, almost smells like hay or something. There’s the first scoop of beans going into the chamber. One thing I learned last night while I was looking up about roasting, I learned that green coffee beans, they’re actually not beans, they’re seeds, which was interesting.
Cary: What temp and time are we doing this at?
Brendan: Let’s do something little dark.
Cary: Really dark?
Brendan: Really dark. There’s a whole guide in here since we’ve never roasted before. It tells you roasting levels, we got light all the way up through Italian. It gives you approximate times and the actual temperatures that you should go. You want to do a Full City or a French?
Cary: Let’s go French.
Brendan: French Roast, so 21 minutes at 482 degrees. This says it’s going to give us a pronounced bitter notes, 482. Rich unique taste, European style and it’s good for iced coffee. Cary’s dialing in the temperature and the time. You just dial, there’s two knobs, there’s one for temp, one for time, you dial them in. When you’re ready, you just press one of the knobs down and it starts the thing going. There it goes. I don’t know if you guys can hear that but it’s running, it’s rolling.
Cary: See how much background noise is in this episode when we’re all done.
Brendan: We dialed in the time and the temperature,
Brendan: but like I mentioned before, I believe you can do this manually where you set your temperature, and you just give it almost infinite time to where you stop it when you think it’s done and it’s at a good point.
Cary: Right. I’m sure there’s benefits to going maybe lower temperatures for longer versus higher temperatures for shorter. I don’t know what would that create differences in the beans at all, but it would be interesting to find out and learn more about this process.
Brendan: Yes. I wonder if it makes sense to preheat this thing. I wonder if getting the beans to a temperature faster changes taste and flavors, almost like when we’re brewing, when we’re cooling down our work-
Cary: Cooling it faster is better, yes.
Brendan: -It helps with haze and stuff. Yes, it would be interesting. So this thing’s rotating, and it is off access, so the beans are constantly churning over one another.
Cary: Yes, and there’s a metal plate through the center so they fall in through both sides as they’re going back and forth. It’s pretty cool to watch.
Brendan: It mixes them up really well. Apparently, this machine does a very, very even roast, not like roasting in a pan or roasting on your stove top if you’re a home roaster, not like necessarily popcorn poppers. Apparently, there’s only a few out there that have enough “umph” to turn your beans and move them around enough. Otherwise, you get some that just kind of stick toward the bottom and get way more dark than other ones. This thing, gosh, simple?
Cary: Yes, very. Set it and forget it pretty much, and it looks like it’s just going to do it all itself.
Brendan: During the roasting process, the first thing we’re supposed to see the beans do is start to turn into a yellow color. You seeing that yet?
Cary: A little bit. They look like they’re just getting brighter. The green beans or the raw beans are kind of light green with a hazy kind of whitish tone on them right now, but the ones that are heating up look like they’re getting a little more yellow, but also getting just kind of a brighter green, almost. Or maybe that’s that yellow color we’re talking about.
Brendan: Yes, so as I was reading, it says they’ll start to smoke, but it’s not actually smoke. It’s steam, because water is escaping out of the green beans. They’re dried, but there’s still apparently some water left in them. I was also reading that they’re going to start emitting a grassy smell. Would you say they smell grassy to start?
Cary: Yes, I was going to say kind of musty or grassy. I’m not getting too much smell yet. We’ve got the vent blowing in the opposite way so we don’t melt ourselves in here. It definitely is warming the room a little bit. It’d be cool waking up and doing this in the morning, especially this time of year when it’s cooling off, like going into your kitchen on a cold morning, warm up your kitchen while you roast beans for 15 minutes and then you have the freshest cup of coffee possible.
Brendan: We’ll have to take turns taking a chomp.
Cary: Me first.
[laughter]
Brendan: Did you put your name on the list?
Cary: That’s right.
Brendan: We haven’t got to the phase where the beans begin browning yet. That’s probably going to be, you know what? I don’t even know if I looked, but I’m assuming that’s going to be probably at least five or 10 minutes into this.
Cary: Yes, we’re still getting a temp. It says it’s at 350 right now, so it’s almost there, or I guess three quarters of the way there. We’re already almost five minutes in. We’re at 16 minutes left.
Brendan: Going from ambient room temperature which is about 74 to– What did you say we’re at? 350?
Cary: 380, I think.
Brendan: 380. We’re trying to get to 480.
Cary: Yes, it takes some time, but I guess they must calculate that into the time it takes to actually roast or get to the corrected roast that you’ve set it for.
Brendan: Yes, because when large scale roasters are roasting, are the roasters already hot when you dump the beans in? That’s something I don’t know. If you’re a roaster, give us a call, send us a tweet, let us know.
Cary: Yes, let us know what we don’t know what we’re talking about.
Brendan: We need to hear that.
[laughter]
Brendan: Are you going to drink this coffee hot or do you want to cold brew it?
Cary: I know, that’s what I was thinking because we’re only doing half a cup right now and typically when we cold brewing or cold brew systems, we’re doing 10-gallon batches or more. No, I want to try both ways. I probably will brew it hot tomorrow morning.
Brendan: Yes, I think I’ll do the same.
Cary: No, it’d be cool to do some little smaller test runs like in a Mason jar or something.
Brendan: We’ll have to bring some Mason jars into the office. Speaking of cold brewing, we just started another large batch for the office. What did we do? Nine pounds of coffee, 12 gallons of water in one of our 15-gallon cold brew systems.
Cary: Yes.
Brendan: We had a little bit more room. There’s probably room for another gallon or two in there.
Cary: Yes. That’ll produce a pretty decent concentration. We usually dilute it by, what would you say, half maybe? So if you do one part of coffee and then maybe another half part of water/cream or whatever you want to do in there, it creates quite a bit of coffee for us.
Brendan: Yes. We’ll come into the office tomorrow morning, and it’s going to be smelling nice and coffee like in here.
Cary: Yes, no kidding.
Brendan: My wife wants to use the leftover grounds and make a coffee sugar scrub. I’ll be taking those home, letting her dry those out and see what happens there.
Cary: Interesting. Won’t stain your skin or anything?
Brendan: We’ll find out.
Cary: You are going to come in with a half body tan the next day.
Brendan: Or depending on how, of course, those beans are just all torn up, road rash. How are these beans looking? They are definitely getting more yellow.
Cary: They’re more like bright, bright yellow now or bright, I would say, yellowish green. It seems like maybe it’s just the reflection, but it looks like a couple of them are starting to turn more that orangeish on its way heading toward the brown. But yes, they’re looking good.
Brendan: Nice. Meanwhile, we’re enjoying some beers here.
Cary: We haven’t talked about our beer.
Brendan: I’ve got my go to Firestone Easy Jack.
Cary: [sneezes]
Brendan: Had a couple– bless you.
Cary: Excuse me, is it normal to have allergies when roasting coffee? Allergies just got crazy.
Brendan: I do see little flakes shooting out of there. Some of them are sitting on the roaster on the red part.
Cary: Right, right. Interesting.
Brendan: I can definitely smell it now. It smells like a popcorn maker in a sense.
Cary: Yes. Like you were saying, kind of a like hay or grass.
Brendan: Like you’re outside a lot more.
Cary: Maybe it’s all psychological, like I think I’m outside–
Brendan: Eyes are starting to water.
Cary: My nose is all stuffed up. Not a very good selling point.
Brendan: Cary got the allergy gene from my mother. I was lucky enough to skip that one. Dad grew up on a farm.
Cary: Lucky. You got his genes. I’m drinking, I think we’ve had this one on the show before, the Ballast Point Calm Before the Storm. It’s a cream ale with coffee and vanilla in it. I’m almost positive we’ve had it on the show.
Brendan: Yea we’ve had it. I had it when Jeff was on the show. We were talking about coffee beers. It’s got cold brew in it, that’s what I’ve read on the site.
Cary: Really? I thought for sure it was more of just like an extract, because you definitely can really taste the coffee. You can really taste the vanilla. It’s a light colored beer.
Brendan: See, this would be interesting to do since we cold brew all the time. Do a beer and add some cold brew concentrate to the fermenter, to the secondary, to see what that does-
Cary: We should.
Brendan: -flavor-wise.
Cary: Look at the beans. They’re getting, I would say, orangeish or very light brown right now. Looking good.
Brendan: Yes, they are. They are definitely changing.
Cary: What’s the time, let me see. We are at 482 for temperature, that’s what we set it at, and we have 11 and a half minutes left. They look like they’re getting to a point of being close to halfway done. Yes, I guess about half the time.
Brendan: You said it’s at 482? It’s at 10?
Cary: Yes, it’s at 10.
Brendan: Okay.
Cary: We still have 11 and a half minutes. Those things are going to get brown. What did it take? Over five or six minutes to get to that temperature. That took a while at first to even start changing the color of the beans.
Brendan: Now, the beans are probably hot and changing, it probably goes a lot faster from this point? Now, I guess we can start watching or listening for the first crack, which it says, the beans will become fragrant at this point. It could sound like popcorn popping, and they will start to lose chaff, which the roaster here, the Gene Cafe Roaster, has a chaff collector. I guess it’s just on one side. Air blows in from one side and then on the opposite end, it’s got a little grate that the chaff gets swept through. There’s a little– what would you call that? Like a little–
Cary: It’s like a little arm. It’s like a pendulum. As the thing rolls, this pendulum wipes back and forth and pushes the chaff through this hole. I guess with the air blowing around, it kind of blows it through as well.
Brendan: Gets it to that side. We see any in there yet or we’re not quite?–
Cary: I can see some building up, collecting on that grate where it’s supposed to go through, you definitely see it.
Brendan: I’ve got the worst seat in the house, I’ve got a camera blocking my view plus this microphone. Cary is our eyes.
Cary: Not your nose though. My nose is just all congested now.
Brendan: As more of this chaff starts falling off, we’ll see if Cary gets more and more allergic to this roasting process.
Cary: See how many times I sneeze.
Brendan: Maybe this thing will just have to stay at my house if you’re allergic to it.
[laughter]
Cary: it’s looking good though. I’m no expert on bean color and stuff, but I would say we are at a light or light medium roast right now.
Brendan: It looks very even now throughout. There’s no beans that are in there that are still green, there’s none that are really dark, they’re very, very evenly colored.
Cary: Yes, they are. I don’t see one standing out at all.
Brendan: Which I imagine has to be a good thing.
Cary: Yes, no green beans.
Brendan: Hopefully this episode isn’t like watching grass grow for some of you. All the experienced roasters like, “Oh my Gosh, don’t talk me through this process, I see this 10 times a day.” Hopefully there’s some of you guys who are home brewers or maybe some cold brewers who get your beans elsewhere. Hopefully, this gets you a little more intrigued and–
Cary: We get lots of people calling us saying they love coffee and they just want to have it on tap at home. They’re going to brew their own two and a half gallon keg. This would be awesome. Make your own coffee beans, grind them and cold brew to have a couple of gallons of coffee on tap.
Brendan: So far this is incredibly simple.
Cary: Right, very. You’d probably have to go through a couple of batches to get enough to make a keg full. For the most part, yes, it’s super easy.
Brendan: After we get this one done, after this episode’s over, I’ll probably start another batch. We’ll probably get a couple different ones done and do a few different roast profiles.
Cary: To see how they look different.
Brendan: Yes. Compare them all to one another and maybe try a manual process as well. Cary and I will take some of these home and see if we can report back in a future episode.
Cary: I’m interested to see how some beans, I don’t know if it’s the bean or the roast, but sometimes you’ll get a bean that’s super oily. Then other times, you’ll get ones that look really dry. I don’t know if a darker roast typically has more of those oils that excrete from the bean or less. I’m interested to just do a few batches and see from light to medium to dark and see if–
Brendan: See how the beans look different? Because these green beans don’t look oily at all.
Cary: No. They almost have a whitish haze over them. Like they’re almost all dried out. Like you were saying, they’re not, there’s moisture in them.
Brendan: We had somebody contact us about cold brewing and I think it said that putting a lighter roast into your keg, you’re actually probably going to be putting more oil into your keg because there’s more oil left in the beans.
Cary: That’s right.
Brendan: Once it’s darker roast you’re actually forcing oils out of the beans because you’re drying them out more.
Cary: It’s really smelling like I’m getting my nose back a little bit. I can smell it, it’s popcorn or little bit of a burnt popcorn smell right now going on. It’s so weird, you wouldn’t expect that, you’d expect to smell coffee, really dark coffee roasting.
Brendan: It’s almost like a dark malt when we’re brewing a caramel. But yes, we never really heat those without water. We always get a bready smell, which I guess we passed that earlier in the process. But now it’s definitely smelling like a burnt popcorn or–
Cary: The beans are really dark now. I wouldn’t say really dark, but they’re either getting much darker– let me see how much time we got left. It says the temp is only at 453 now, but we’ve got five and half minutes. I don’t know if it’s auto cooling down or what the deal is there.
Brendan: I wonder if it’s too cool in here for it to hit its optimal temperature.
Cary: That’s right. We have the AC cranking so this little exhaust vent on here doesn’t heat us out.
Brendan: You turned the temp up to 482, right?
Cary: That’s what I did.
Brendan: I think that’s the max– you know what? I think I read in here somewhere that depending on your– because this is only 110 volt, it plugs into a standard outlet. I believe that depending on your electrical, if you’re plugged into an outlet that’s maybe shared, you might not be able to draw as much power as you need.
Cary: Maybe it just can’t get there.
Brendan: Yes, it might be maxed out, so we might not actually hit that full 482 degrees.
Cary: Maybe I was just seeing what it was supposed to be set at earlier. I thought it was there, but it flashes what temperature you’re supposed to be at, and then it flashes what temperature you’re actually at. It goes back and forth letting you know constantly where you’re at.
Brendan: I wonder if we can add more time to compensate for that, or if you will never hit a French roast or a full city roast if you’re at a lower temperature?
Cary: At while you’re brewing? Maybe.
Brendan: Yes, while it’s roasting, I wonder if you add more time or–?
Cary: I don’t know if we will need to. Those beans are getting dark.
Brendan: How much time is left?
Cary: Five minutes– four minutes left. They’re looking nice and dark. I wouldn’t say full French roast yet, but definitely pretty medium dark right now.
Brendan: We set up a tripod. We’ve got the iPhone on it doing a time lapse video of this whole process. We’ll make sure we post that so you guys can see this thing tumble. See all the beans churning in there. I think the coolest part is going to be watching it change color through this process. For sure.
Cary: Yes. I want to see how quickly that changes color on a time lapse, that will be pretty cool.
Brendan: I’ll put this on our Instagram once we’re done here. Get it right up.
Cary: There you go.
Brendan: What other kind of beers we got out there? We’ve got five minutes left, I think.
Cary: Yes, let’s go grab some. Hang on a second.
Brendan: All right. We’re back with beers, but while we were getting the beers, whoa–
Cary: In the midst of all this, it’s almost like the thing caught fire, but I think the beans just got to their optimum level and really this thing started smoking a lot. This is not something you roast this heavily indoors.
Brendan: Yes, don’t do this indoors. Unless– I’m flipping through the book. It does say we can hook a dryer exhaust hose to the output on this and basically you’d be pumping all this smoke outdoors, which would have been smart.
Cary: Yes, that would have been a good idea. We are in a fog box right now, it’s incredible.
Brendan: Let me turn the fan on. The roasting, however, just finished. But we still got a lot of smoke coming out of this thing. It started its cooling process, it’s still tumbling the beans.
Cary: Yes, it’s pretty cool. It goes into an automatic cool down and just continues to tumble. I assume, they’re continuing to roast at this point as it cools down. This way you’re not pulling this thing out and you’re handling 450 degree beans, they’re going to be–
Brendan: Yes, they’re going to be hot for some time.
Cary: Was it cooler like a 150 or–?
Brendan: 140 and then it automatically shuts down.
Cary: You can pull the container out, it’s got a handle on it, and then dump it out into a jar or whatever you keep them in.
Brendan: Yes. We’ll time how long it takes to get down from whatever it was? 480? It got close to 4–?
Cary: Yes. It got up to 470 something there at the end when it was smoking and those beans were really–
Brendan: We’ll take notes and see how long it takes to cool it down. We probably won’t talk the whole time because now that the beans are changing color–
Cary: I can barely breathe in here.
Brendan: Yes, we’ve got to figure–
Cary: I can barely see you actually, it’s so foggy.
[laughter]
Brendan: We need to find some sort of vent system, at least pump this back into the warehouse.
Cary: Let the warehouse guys deal with it.
Brendan: Yes. Those things got dark.
Cary: They really did.
Brendan: It seems like it happened almost instantaneously–
Cary: It got to a point where it was like–
Brendan: Brown or black.
Cary: Grabbing a beer and all of a sudden, yes. Then also I’m noticing– I was asking about this earlier, that oiliness on the beans, they were super oily-looking, shiny. They look awesome. But prior getting to that black roast or dark, dark roast, they did not look like that, they were just like a dark brown matte bean, not a shiny–
Brendan: Yes, and you actually see the oils on the inside of the cylinder.
Cary: Yes. We will probably have to wash that thing well between uses. I wonder if the oils in there will start to burn more.
Brendan: Yes, it actually does talk about that. It says the roasting chamber oils and residual debris remaining from the roasting process will build up and adversely affect the taste of future batches. Clean the chamber with dish-washing brush, sponge and a dish-washing liquid. Dry the chamber completely before storing it away. That is something you will have to worry about, but just that chamber and the chaff collector is pretty much the only things you have to maintain on this thing.
Cary: Yes, they’re small too. They pop right out. Dishwasher safe, you said?
Brendan: No, it says use a brush or dishwasher soap or dish-washing detergent.
Cary: Cool.
Brendan: Yes. This thing’s cooling down, it’s still tumbling. Cary got us some new beers. I’m now onto a Firestone Luponic Distortion number two.
Cary: Is it? I thought it was number three.
Brendan: Is it number three? It is a number three. Is there number four out? [crosstalk]
Cary: I don’t think so, because we just had that recently at the tap room down the street.
Brendan: [unintelligible 00:30:53] McGregor’s?
Cary: McGregor’s in Moorpark. I think this is one of my favorite ones I’ve done. It’s hard to tell, because I’ve never had one next to a two next to a three. I think it’s the same base beer and they a hop them differently. But we heard that they were dry hopping this one, which we typically like as you get more the hop smell, hop aroma on the beer.
Brendan: Anything to kill the aroma in here.
Cary: I know. Yes, really. Go to the go to the website if you want to check out this roaster and then also the Drips & Draughts website where we will be posting videos and pictures of these processes. It’s been fun.
Brendan: Cary got a couple pictures or a video of the smokestack on this thing. [laughs] Make sure we put those up. Yes, we’ll put some pictures and videos on our Instagram page probably before this episode even comes out. We’ll get some of those up soon.
Cary: Boom.
Brendan: All right. I think we can pause for now. Maybe hop back in later or I’ll finish up with an outro on this, which is to give a rundown.
Cary: That’s cool. Fun.
Brendan: That was fun.
Cary: Cool little machine.
Brendan: We are going to have to keep this going. We’re going to have to get a grinder in here.
Cary: And some kind of ventilation.
Brendan: Yes, absolutely. Send us your votes for best grinders.
Cary: Yes, grinder– maybe an office coffee machine. We don’t even have a hot coffee maker here yet.
Brendan: Yes, we have a kegerator full of cold brew.
[laughter]
All right. That does it for this episode, roasting and beers.
[Music]
All right. Thanks for listening to this episode. That was a lot of fun for us, we absolutely smoked this place out with our first batch of coffee on this thing. We did a French Roast, we put it on a pretty high setting. Yes, as you heard, after we grabbed some beers, we came back and this thing was just pumping out smoke. Lesson learned there, if you’re going to do a very dark roast on this machine, it pays to either be right by a window or hook up an exhaust hose to it so you can pump that smoke outside.
You should have seen our office. [laughs] It was something else. After we recorded the episode, we started another batch, we did a lighter roast. Cary took a few different roast profiles home. Since then I’ve roasted one or two more batches. I’m going to be taking four different roast profiles home. We’ll do a follow-up episode for sure, but before he left today, we started talking. We both just love the simplicity of this machine. We decided we’re actually going to start offering it on keg outlet.
We talked to the vendor that we got it from and we decided we wanted to start offering these on our website, because this is a very nice piece of equipment. It’s very well made and it’s just so simple to use. If you’ve got any interest in learning more about these Gene Cafe home roasters, you can check them out by going to dripsanddraughts.com/genecafe. That’s G-E-N-E-C-A-F-E. dripsanddraughts.com/genecafe.
After having used this and played with it a bit more, I’m sure we’ll do a follow-up episode where we do a more complete review of the system, especially once we start learning more about the roasting process. This episode was just meant to be a fun kind of intro episode for anybody who might be interested in getting into roasting at home. I’ll tell you what, if we can do it, you can absolutely do it. Make sure you stay tuned for future episodes of Drips & Draughts because we will absolutely do a follow-up episode checking in and telling you what we thought of our first roasts.
All right. I think we’re about done today. If you are looking for show notes for this episode, you can find those by going to dripsanddraughts.com/29. Like I said earlier, it’s been quite a while since we’ve gotten a review. The more reviews we get, the less we ask for them. Take a quick minute, hop onto iTunes, click to review, and rate us. We will love you forever. That’s it for today. We’ll see you again next Friday.
Mentioned in this Show
Speedwell Coffee
