Feb. 14, 2013
One of our regular home roasting customers (and super nice guy) Henry Chang dropped by today to show us his Mini-500 No, not his sub-compact sports car…his mini-shop roaster. Henry personally imported it from Taiwan a few years back. It looked very cool parked next to our much larger Probat roaster. The Mini 500 is a propane burning drum roasterA roaster with a rotating drum that provides agitation to the beans, while a heating element (typically either electric or gas) provides heat. The metal drum conducts heat... that has can roast 500 g. (just over 1 lb.) per batch. It’s essentially a sample roaster or small-scale commercial roaster, with a variable cast iron drum, needle gas valve for flame adjustment, and an external cooling tray. Henry vents his roaster using dryer tubing, which attaches perfectly to the top of the chaffChaff is paper-like skin that comes off the coffee in the roasting process. Chaff from roasting is part of the innermost skin (the silverskin) of the coffee fruit... cyclone. It’s a fun roaster to use, but we wouldn’t recommend it to anyone without a good deal of roasting experience under his/her belt. Are we going to sell it on sweetmarias.com any time soon? No way. Hottops, Gene Cafe’s, Behmors, FreshRoasts, Nescos, and popcorn poppers are more our speed.
- 500 g. capacity (just over 1 lb)
- cast iron drum
- chaff collector
- variable drum speed
- adjustable damper for exit air
- gas burner with needle valve for fine adjustments
- cooling tray with powerful fan
- bean probe & ambient temperatureThe temperature in a given room or space: This term is used to describe the overall temperature in a given environment, and is an important variable in coffee... readout
10/5/2017 – UPDATE: Nevermind what we said about never carrying this machine. Maybe it was just the lack of new machines coming onto the market that made us feel the need to offer more home roasting options. We have decided to carry the Mini-500. We aren’t sure exactly when or if they will be made available on Coffee Shrub or Sweet Maria’s but we should have them up soon and we’ll let you know.
