Espresso68
New member
Does anyone know of a Owners site for Fluidbed coffee roasters?
Sonofresco Owners site/forum
- Thread starter Espresso68
- Start date
Seb
Member
Here is a page with lots of links. I use myself a fluid bed roaster, was using a drum roaster before.
Home - Air Roasted Coffee
Home - Air Roasted Coffee
CoffeeJunky
New member
how do you like fluid bed roaster compare to drum roaster. I thought drum roasters would never (never might be strong word) go to fluid bed roaster. 
Seb
Member
how do you like fluid bed roaster compare to drum roaster. I thought drum roasters would never (never might be strong word) go to fluid bed roaster.
Short answer is i really like it....
I have done few blind tasting of the same coffee roasted on my drum and my fluid bed and i can taste a difference between the two 100% of the time. But, it is not necessarily better or worst, it is just different. Just like a Chemex and a Hario V60 do not taste the same. The coffee from the drum roaster have a little bit more body with more sweetness. The coffee from the FB show more brightness, more fruity notes. The difference i not huge as my friend and few customers where unable to really taste the difference in all the pair of coffee i served blind.
One thing for sure is that i MUCH prefer to roast on my FB then a drum. The reason is mostly related to the cleaning/maintenance! In a drum, many debris/chaff will felt during roasting on the heating source and will get burnt. This smell bad, create more ash and oily surface to clean later on. On a FB roaster, this never happen, all the particules go up and the debris are aspirate into the chaff receptacle so the exhaust pipes stay very clean, only some dust to vacuum from time to time. I also very like to see the beans getting lofted in front of me. It also offer me the possibility to roast some special kind of oat for a local microbrewery which would be impossible on my drum. My drum roaster with an electrostatic filter unit create more smoke then my fluid bed roaster that have no afterburner. So a fluid bed roaster is a much cleaner way to roast for sure and is very easy to maintain. I simply love roasting on it.
I think i will sell both of my roasters this year (one is almost sold) and get a bigger electric fluid bed roaster like a 10kg or so. If i was getting an other "drum" roaster i think i would go with one that use hot air roasting like the Revelation from USRC. Oh and BTW USRC are working on a new design of air roaster (release in 2018-2019) and they have been building only drum roasters since the beginning so that mean something.
Last edited:
Seb
Member
In fact i think this is more than a small nuance. But i know the taste of my drum roaster very well so it certainly give me an edge in blind tasting. The nose was different and the balance in mouth. I am also a certified national wine judge so this background help also for sure. I am pretty sure that the answer in the taste differenc comes from the convection roasting VS conduction. But also, there might be some taste impact coming from the drum that is covered by some oily residus from all previous batch, i am not sure. Maybe this give the coffee some more body? But i think it is the method of roasting that influence the most (convection vs conduction).
