With a hurricane-type lampshade attached, roasting with a Orville Redenbacher Presto 1440 watt Popcorn Popper is simple and easy.
The beans move around quickly, although you can’t tell that from the photos. The popper heats and blows air with lots of power. The beans did need quick cooling after roasting in a colander and then the freezer, though.
For the roast pretty much fill the popper until the beans were moving real slowly.
However, roasted some robusta the other day with only a handful of beans, and it went fine, albeit a little slower.
The hurricane lampshade thing (which gets real hot - make sure you have a kitchen mitt) keeps the beans from flying out, although at times with less bean one or two will pop out. What is amazing is with all that flying about (and with lesser amounts of beans they fly up at least a foot) they still get hot enough to roast to a first crack and then a second rolling crack pretty quick — under ten minutes, in any case, and a lot faster with less beans… almost as fast as my FreshRoast (just got the new improved chamber - Thanks to Tim at FreshBeans!), which is of course in itself a bottom air model.
In any case the beans move around real well, which means the roast is going to be even. I don’t understand how people can get uneven roasts with this setup unless they overload the thing.
I think I prefer roasting with the Redenbacher to my FreshRoast, except for the lack of a cooling cycle, which means thing get hectic real quick when the roasts get dark; I’m going to try freezing the cast iron pan to cool them, that should be easy and is no more obsessive than any of my other coffee behaviors.
The FreshRoast is, of course, easier to control, and you don’t risk wasting a big batch of beans. I’m looking forward towards using the new improved roasting chamber, which ships standard with the newer FreshRoast Plus.
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