The Behmor 1600 - New Coffee Roasting Appliance

[MGLloyd]

Just in case anyone in this forum has ever thought about roasting coffee, a new home coffee roasting applicance has just hit the market. The Behmor 1600

This can roast up to 1 pound to a Full City roast. It has an afterburner to deal with the smoke and can be used inside on a countertop.

I have no affiliation with Behmor or the inventor, Joe Behm. I have been home roasting coffee for about six years now, and just purchased a Behmor. This device has gotten a great deal of favorable attention at CoffeeGeek and other coffee forums.

[scubadoo97]

I started roasting at about the same time back when you were at the coop. How do you like the Behmor?

[Fat Guy]

I have a sample Behmor 1600 coming from James at The Coffee Project next week. I'll be sure to give it a thorough road test, compare it to my I-Roast, and report back.

MGLloyd, how are you making out with the unit? Any observations or recommended tactics at this point?

[slkinsey]

I was excited to read about the larger capacity and smoke-handling capability. But I read that it's not good for dark roasting, and I roast almost exclusively for espresso.

[Fat Guy]

Sam, if you like, what I'll do after I've played with the Behmor 1600 for a couple of weeks is I'll hand it off to you, and we can also pass it around to a couple of other New York-area members if they're interested. If it's really great, I get to keep it, though.

[slkinsey]

Sweet! I wouldn't mind giving it a try with my espresso blend.

[eje]

There's a pretty extensive writeup of the pros and cons of the Behmor 1600 on the Sweet Maria's site:

Sweet Maria's Behmor Roaster Guide - v 1.0 (under construction!)

The Behmor is the ideal roaster for a very specific use: doing full 1/2lb or 1lb light or medium roasts with a limited amount of control. This certainly suits some of the roasters out there perfectly. Heavily chaffed and small bean coffees are problematic in this roaster. Right away you also know that if you are only going to be doing dark roasts, this machine might not be for you. You can get a dark roast - but you would essentially be watching every dark roast carefully with your finger on the cool button. We would suggest a different machine or setup if you plan to only do dark roasts. It's not impossible to dark roast though but the problems with doing so should be duly noted.

[MGLloyd]

I am really enjoying it. My roasting odyssey began with a Hearthware Gourmet, then proceeded through a hot air popper, whirly-pop, Caffe Rosto, heatgun/dogbowl and stovetop. For the past four years, I had been doing the heatgun/dogbowl and stovetop exclusively.

For me, batch size was not the attraction for the Behmor, since I routinely do one pound batches via HG/DB and the stovetop. The evenness of the roast and the repeatability of the Behmor is what appeals to me. The cooling also works better since my former cooling method consisted of pouring the coffee between two colanders.

So far the P3 profile is my favorite. Although there is little visible smoke, it can still set off the smoke detectors, so I use it sitting on a large cutting board on the stovetop under the hood. I run the hood during roasting. You have to think ahead on the roast and hit the cool button several seconds before you desired roast level. Since the beans are somewhat hard to see clearly, I roast to my desired level by the sound of the cracks. My favorite roast level is generally a City to Full City plus, and the Behmor does this with aplomb.

I like it. The build quality is excellent, and if the machine is more durable than most home roasting appliances, we can really have a winner here.

[Fat Guy]

The Behmor 1600 has arrived from the Coffee Project, and the second we opened the box and gazed upon its mass we nicknamed it "The Behemoth." This thing is serious. I haven't had time to pull it out and use it, but I extracted the owner's manual and will read that tonight. I'll try to do some roasting tomorrow.

[MGLloyd]

A couple of suggestions: make sure that all packing material is removed, and do the 'dry burn' referenced in the manual to burn off all manufacturing and packing residues. Some people even do the dry burn twice. The drive shaft on the right side of the cylinder may be a little tight sliding it into the motor drive. If there are any burrs on the drive shaft, a few swipes with a file or emery cloth will take care of it. If you have a vent hood available, I would recommend that you put the Behmor under it while roasting, if possible. This is particularly true if you are roasting one pound batches to city or full city.

[Fat Guy]

As we speak, the Behemoth is sitting under my range hood and is on its second dry-burn pre-cleaning cycle.

[Fat Guy]

So, first a little backstory. In 2002, I was contacted by James from the Coffee Project. He wanted me to test out a FreshRoast roaster, and so he sent me a sample roaster and a bunch of beans. I had never roasted coffee before. I wrote up a report here.

Since then, I've gone through another FreshRoast machine and am currently using an i-Roast. Recently, James saw a photo in a magazine of my i-Roast sitting in my kitchen and he emailed me. He has been selling the Behmor 1600 and one of the units that came in had a couple of dents that made it unsaleable but weren't likely to affect performance. So he offered it up to me for testing.

The box arrived yesterday:

The thing is large. It's substantially larger than an average toaster oven. Deeper too. It's also a significant, weighty piece of metal. I believe it weights about 20 pounds. The unit is packed with a drum, a chaff-collecting tray and a brush. Here are some photos of what you get in the box:

You put the unit together like so:

Here's a close-up of the keypad:

The owner's manual (you can read it online on the Behmor website) suggests running the machine through a self-cleaning process before use. I did this three times. (Also recommended is a self-cleaning cycle after each five roasts.)

This is how it looks during the self-cleaning process:

I've got some beans in now and will do a few batches today and report back.

[Fat Guy]

Having read the claims that the Behmor is no good for dark roasting, I of course decided for my first test to try a dark roast. I decided to go easy on the machine: I did only 1/2 pound, and I used decaf Colombian RSWP (there's little chaff with decaf). Based on past experience with other machines, and looking at the roasting curves, I took a wild guess that 1/2 pound on program P2 for time C (14 minutes) would get me a dark roast. Amazingly, I didn't have to add or subtract time at all. Really lucky guess. At exactly 14 minutes, when the machine switched to its cool-down cycle, the beans had just reached the rapid stage of the second crack.

Here's what the finished beans look like in the drum:

And here they are in a bowl:

This first test was very positive. Not that I've actually tasted coffee made from these beans, but I've done this enough to be pretty sure they came out well. The machine is exceptionally quiet for a roaster -- if you've only ever used a hot-air machine you'll be amazed.

It produces very little smoke, even roasting to the level I roasted to. So I'm not really sure what the concerns were about dark roasting. I guess you could push it darker, but I wouldn't really roast darker than that rapid-second-crack stage anyway. I'll see how a full pound of non-decaf works for dark roasting, but for my own purposes I don't think I'd ever want to roast more than 1/2 pound at a time anyway.

It's not a zero-smoke product. I saw no visible smoke but smelled plenty, so you do still need some real ventilation. But it's much better smoke-wise than the other roasters I've used.

[Fat Guy]

If there are any burrs on the drive shaft, a few swipes with a file or emery cloth will take care of it. 

←

I had no problem getting the drive shaft in, but it was sticky getting it out. I had to knock around in there a bit in order to be able to remove the drum. Maybe that's just first-time stickiness, but if not then I'll do some filing.

[MGLloyd]

That is a really good looking roast. I am routinely roasting full one pound batches to full city plus (30 seconds into second crack), using the P-3/D profile with no problem. I have read on Coffeegeek of people roasting quarter and half pound batches to French/Vienna. I think the concern on doing a French/Vienna roast with a full pound batch is that the risk of the batch running away and catching on fire is higher.

[Fat Guy]

Flash photos of roasts are a little misleading, because the strobe gives such an oily richness to the appearance of the beans. In real life, those beans look blacker, with more of a matte finish. They're darker than I'd normally roast for a whole batch (I'll cut these beans with some light-roasted beans for a nice blend). I know they don't exactly look it in the photo, but I'd characterize them as a Vienna roast.

[slkinsey]

Huh. That certainly seems dark enough for a Northern Italy style espresso roast.

[slkinsey]

Here is a good reference guide to various roasting levels:

http://www.sweetmarias.com/roasting-VisualGuideV2.html

[Fat Guy]

You can have the machine next week, Sam. Given that the thing roasts so much coffee so quickly, I'll be out of beans this weekend and will have so much stockpiled in the freezer that I won't need to roast again until summer. And I think you'll be better suited to evaluating its espresso-worthiness, since you make espresso all the time and I make it quarterly. You may need a team of Clydesdales to get it across the park, though.

[slkinsey]

Sweet. It certainly does look like it roasts dark enough just fine for my style of espresso. Perhaps when they say "dark roasting" they're talking about people who like that Starbuck's style, almost-black, oily roast? This style has always tasted over-roasted to me, but to each his own I suppose. Anyway, from what you're showing I don't have too many misgivings about its espresso-roasting worthiness.

[MGLloyd]

So far, I have only made two batches for espresso, one batch was a quarter pound and the other a half pound. My two favorite espresso blends are Liquid Amber and Malabar Gold. The Behmor did a fine job with both of those, bearing in mind that any blend will have different levels of roast within the same batch. I tend to take my espresso blends to a Vienna roast.

[Fat Guy]

Because I had about 10 ounces of the decaf Colombian RSWP beans and had used 8 ounces in the Behemoth, I took the last 2 ounces and roasted them in the i-Roast to a similar level of doneness. Then I made some press-pot coffee from each. In both cases the beans came out well. My level of ability to discern minor variations in coffee is not particularly high, but I think the drum roaster may be producing slightly mellower coffee than the i-Roast. Still good acidity, but not as harsh. Of course there are variables that are hard to control for. I tried to use sort-of-similar roasting curves but who knows? And I would normally not drink coffee until the day after roasting, but for this experiment I didn't want to deal with the delay.

I also roasted some regular coffee, Colombian Supremo Bucharamonga Especial. This is my house coffee, the one I serve to guests etc. It's super cheap but I think the quality is great. Coffee Project sells it for $3 a pound if you buy 25 pounds. Because my wife drinks mostly decaf and has for awhile now, I have more of this Colombian Supremo Bucharamonga Especial stuff around than I know what to do with. So, it was no problem to waste 2 pounds on today's experiments.

It took me 4 tries with 1/2 pound batches to achieve what I wanted to achieve: a Starbuck's-style incinerated roast that could be done on an automatic setting. The first 2 times I tried it I had to add time, then I nailed it on the third try, then I did it again to make sure I could replicate it. The machine is remarkably consistent, it seems.

Anyway, I haven't worked up to a full-pound batch yet, but I can say with confidence that you can roast as dark as you damn well please on a 1/2-pound batch. When you get into Starbuck's territory, you do start to get some visible smoke -- but you get less of it with a 1/2-pound batch than you get with a 2-ounce batch in an i-Roast or FreshRoast.

Tomorrow I'll try to roast a full pound to a normal medium roast. And maybe at some point, fire extinguisher in hand, I'll attempt a dark roast on a full pound, just to determine once and for all if it's possible.

[Fat Guy]

Working my way through some of the samples from the Coffee Project, earlier this morning I roasted two one-pound batches of Zimbabwe La Lucie Estate Royal to full city with no trouble at all. 1#-P1-B. This coffee, by the way, is excellent. It's pricey at $8.50 for a single pound and $7 per pound if you by 25 pounds, but it's really nice. A little light in the body (I'll probably mix a bit of some other bean in for a bit more body) but amazing flavor and acidity. I'm sure it will be even better after 24 hours of rest.

[Fat Guy]

In terms of chaff collection, the design of the Behemoth is imperfect. I'd say the chaff collector catches 3/4 of the chaff. There's a whole lot of chaff left in the back of the machine after a roast. The brush is not an efficient tool for cleaning it up because it pushes too much chaff onto the counter or floor. You really need to get in there with a Dustbuster.

As I mentioned before, consistency is remarkable. The two one-pound batches I roasted this morning, back to back without even letting the machine rest, were indistinguishable (to me at least).

It's also amazing to me how much output you can get from this thing. I don't even want to think about how long it would take to roast two pounds of coffee with the i-Roast.

[Fat Guy]

I've now roasted so much coffee it's just silly.

The one thing I'll mention that I forgot to mention is that the thing has a nice light in it. This is not only useful for seeing the color of the beans as they're roasting, but also for cleanup purposes.

The Behemoth gets my seal of approval. I'm convinced that it's a step forward in home coffee roasting. And as far as I can tell the claim that it isn't good for dark roasts is unfounded.

Time to start passing it around.