Product review: Nesco Home Coffee Roaster

Hi, My name’s Lane … and I’m a home-roast coffee junkie.

Pausing for a moment … and listening to the sound of chirping crickets … since–unlike so many other 12-step meetings–the home-roast crowd is pretty small …………. and that’s a damned shame!

We’ve been roasting coffee at home for nearly six years now. We LOVE it! Unlike that mass-produced stuff you buy in the grocery store–or even some of those fancy coffees they sell in specialty coffee houses, the ones where they’ve tried to convince you that DARK ROAST is BETTER! –our coffee has tremendous flavor and individuality that you just don’t get in a normal coffee cup.

Ever wonder why your Folgers always tastes the same? Ever wonder why Starbucks always tastes the same … no matter what part of the world you walk in and say “gimmie a grande!” Well, I’ll tell you why: it’s because all the beans have been CONSISTENTLY INCINERATED! They’ve all been BURNED to the same level of char … to take all the individuality out of them, and to make them all taste the same. In other words, the companies and individuals who do this sacrifice flavor for consistency ……..

………… and I never really realized what a crime that was until I had my first taste of home-roasted coffee

The reality is … fine green coffee beans are like fine wine! If you treat them right and roast them light, you can potentially taste a million different flavors in a cup of home-roast coffee: blackberries, sandalwood, chocolate, cinnamon, citrus, and more … just to name a few of the hundreds of potential flavor profiles you might encounter in a cup of home-roast!

Granted, I know that sounds strange if you’ve been drinking Folgers or Maxwell House your whole life, but it’s really easy to understand–especially if you’re a canner. Think about it this way: green coffee beans are an agricultural crop, just like tomatoes or potatoes. They vary from bean to bean, field to field, farmer to farmer, process to process, season to season … and more. There are coffee farmers near the Indian city of Mysore who plant cardamon and black pepper plants beside their coffee plants, which–in turn–share flavors with the coffee plant and beans. In the Malabar region, they open up the drying houses near the beach when the monsoon season hits, letting the winds and salt spray mimic what used to happen to the beans when they were once shipped in wooden vessels. Why? you ask. It’s simple. As shipping methods improved, their long-standing English customers started complaining that their Malabar coffees just didn’t taste as good anymore, so now the farmers make sure to “monsoon” their beans before they ship them, to create Monsooned Malabar coffee. And don’t even get me started on how they process Kopi Luwak coffee beans! There’s so much to explore!

Home-roasting is also fairly economical: at least, if you spend any sort of decent money on your coffee … it is. If you buy those great big red cans of Folgers at Costco–and consider that a lot to spend–then I can’t help you. That stuff is just amazingly cheap … but you get what you pay for if you pay pennies a pot for your coffee. However, if you enjoy more along the line of gourmet coffees that tend to run in the $15-30/lb range–or more–then home-roasting your own coffee beans can save you $10 or more a pound for beans. In fact, we buy the bulk of our coffee beans from www.sweetmarias.com … and most of our favorite “greens” average $6/lb or so. And I’m not talking about dreck here. I’m talking about the gourmet varietals  with names like Kenya Kirinyaga Gachami Peaberry–a moniker that includes the country, the region, the coffee co-op that grew it, and the style of bean–not just something they call Arabica or Columbian. It’s enough to turn you into a complete junkie ……..

….. and then your coffee roaster breaks … again.

We always burned through about one a year anyway, but we just considered it the cost of great coffee: expensive, but worth every nickle! Besides, we saved enough money roasting our own that we could afford to burn up a $200 roaster every year or so. That is … right up until one day when our roaster broke … and we discovered that they were on back-order.

So we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

And … waited.

Fast forward to the first of 2011. At this point, we’ve been without a coffee roaster for far too long already. I’d almost forgotten what we were missing. The problem is … our favorite coffee roaster–the iRoast–has been on terminal back order for more than a year now. We waited and waited and waited for them to come back on the market … heck, when I was on my Food Journey 2010, I even stopped by their US distributor’s office in Gurnee IL to all but beg them to get one in. No luck! The receptionist explained that there had been a manufacturing delay (yeah, right … for like 18 months and counting by that point) … and that they were projected to be back on the market in MARCH of 2011.

Am I the only one who thinks that’s a wee bit ridiculous?

We finally broke down this month and bought another roaster, a Nesco 800 watt home roaster, Model# CR-1010-PRR.

Of course … three days after my husband ordered it, we got notice that the the iRoast is back in stock finally. Typical, huh? However–at this point–we decided to just say the heck with them! They annoyed us by basically getting us hooked on them … and then abandoning us … so we’re going to vote with our wallets. We’re going to see how well the Nesco works instead … and, more importantly, what kind of longevity they have. They’re already cheaper … so if they last about the same amount of time … we come out ahead.

My husband is the master coffee roaster (and maker) in the house, so–in this case–I just get to sit back and enjoy

He’s been using our new roaster for about two weeks now, and reports the following:

• the Nesco roasts about one and a half pots worth of beans at one time. The iRoast roasted more like two pots worth of beans/roasting. We drink two pots of coffee a day, minimum. This means that he’s now basically roasting every single day–and often twice a day, trying to get ahead–when his old iRoast let him only roast once a day or so, and he could roast a couple of times a day for a couple of days … and have enough coffee to keep us going … AND to send to his dad too. Now with the Nesco, it’s going to take him more times roasting to generate the same amount of coffee.
• the Nesco was less expensive overall, but it also isn’t heat-programmable like the iRoast is. You can set a time limit for the roast on both, but you can only control the heat on the iRoast. With the Nesco, it’s just on/off, period. This makes a difference with some coffees, since some beans work better if you subject them to a change of temperature several times across the span of the roast.
• it takes longer to do a roast in the Nesco than it does in the iRoast, plus it has more fiddly bits to take apart/clean/put back together than the iRoast does.

Me? I just get great flavor!