popper is a coffee roaster – Page 2

October 3, 2021October 3, 2021

Popper Deconstruction: Inside an Air Coffee Roaster

A very basic video about making and testing Popper, the air coffee roaster.

Here’s a video to show a few early versions of the machine, and some aspects I had to deal with in getting this project completed.

I don’t think this is a video of general interest so please don’t expect much, and the quality isn’t great. I was trying to move the camera phone around to show details and didn’t always do a great job. Ugh.

Also I need to make it clear that you shouldn’t do what I do here, because opening up the machine voids the warranty against manufacturer defect. I made the video to provide some background details only, and show how I test temperatures.

Some things I go over here are
A look at an early prototype
Location of the thermal cutout switch that protects Popper from overheating
When I have a unit that turns off before reaching dark roasts, how i move the thermal cutout switch upward to solve the issue.
How I use a thermometer to probe the bean mass
Show a bare version with probe locations for input air and bean temperatures
Deconstruct (partially) a Popper to show how it’s put together
Talk about the unit that easily roasted 140 grams, and why I couldn’t get it built that way 😢

PS – this is in my workshop space where I store the pallets of Popper, hence the motorbikes and cars and such.

Inside Popper Coffee Roaster

March 4, 2021March 4, 2021

Some things take time, like manufacturing a coffee roaster …

popper*, the coffee roaster was right on the verge of going into production.

… but one thing just wasn’t right. The factory had sent sample after sample, but the fan speed (and therefore the air flow) was not consistent. This impacted the potential batch size.

A late night video chat with the engineers in China made it clear to me though. They were testing under the principle that the roaster should not use the entire pre-programmed roast cycle of 7 minutes. They thought of 0 to 7 as a range so they were presupposing what I wanted was a 4 minute roast!

Well, a 4 minute roast is easy in a popper, but it’s rarely an ideal roast time. In fact, the whole idea of *popper is that the user can fluidly adjust roast time up or down on the fly. It’s a manual, low tech machine, unless you want to get in there with an arduino interface etc.

It’s a machine that rewards people who want to play around with the variables, so it’s simple to do a 7 minute roast just to first crack and add 2 or 3 minutes for development. You just have to be there and tend to your roast, make intuitive decisions and turn a knob. Simple.

(For me I actually feel the 7 minute pre-set roast time can work very well. For City roast I target 5:30 to hear the start of first crack, and the remaining 1:30 for further development. Remember, roast time is relative to the device and the type of thermal transfer. Higher air flow and more movement of the mass means more rapid levels of heat transfer via convection.)

November 10, 2020November 10, 2020

Let’s call it February …

Popper* will make coffee go pop, but probably pop corn too. And it is coming along nicely. No need to rush to get it made before Christmas, because it needs to do what it’s supposed to do. It’s going to be February I think.

The prototype samples were going well except in one regard: Each seemed to roast a little less than the previous. We ended up with a final sample straining to move 85 grams of fresh green coffee. No!

So we delayed production to balance out fan and heat and the roast chamber vents. I worked on the exit air vents thinking they were constricting flow … but it turned out it was the inlet air vents. And just minor tweaks made big changes in batch capacity.

But those changes impacted the heat curve too and, while I could roast 140 grams, too much heat was blowing by the coffee and out of the roaster. I couldn’t get darker roasts within a single cycle. (I could by adding time, but we need dark roasts to be in closer range).

So now, fingers crossed, last set of prototypes are on the way with new fan speed, and an additional set of roast chambers, 5 in all, to find the best combination.

I think this is it! What I want is a 120 gram target that makes use of the range of air and heat settings, allowing manual profiling with extended roast times, and full roast range.

And with that, I’m able to get some really striking profiles that don’t at all taste like fast popcorn popper air roasts. Low heat warm-up times, ramping up to first crack, and backing off to finish the roast with control. The 10 minute roast profile I did yesterday of Guji Uraga Hare Wato was really the best roast I have had of that coffee. Really fantastic, sweet and floral.