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Hottop Coffee Roasterby Phil Jordan This article originally appeared on Too Much Coffee. This article and it's photos are Copyright 2004 Too Much Coffee and are reproduced with permission IntroductionThis article covers the experiences of an early adopter of the Hottop roaster in its production form. What this article is, is a story about Life with a Hottop. What it is not is a detailed technical review of the machine, or a detailed set of instructions about how to use the machine. Such can be found elsewhere (see the web bibliography at the end of this article).
What is it?What is it? Where have you been? The Hottop is only the most-talked about home coffee roaster in the last couple of years - or at least it was until the I-Roast was announced recently. It's certainly the most expensive coffee roaster available for the domestic market, and I know some smaller professional roasting outfits have considered it as an inexpensive sample roaster. The Hottop is a drum coffee roaster, designed for home use, with a manufacturer's recommended batch size of 250g of green beans per roast. This also makes it the highest-capacity (commercially manufactured) home roaster by a small margin, as the Alpenröst is specified to take a batch size of 225g. The Hottop is electrically powered, both for heating and drum rotation - no gas here, unlike in professional sample roasters. It is also computer controlled - at the time of writing it is the only shipping home roaster with a built in roasting profile (temperature over time). This is both good news and bad news. Mainly it's good news as it means that the results produced are closer to those produced by professional drum roasters (note I said closer, not identical). It's bad news if, after becoming proficient with the machine, you decide that in some cases you know better than the programming how a particular coffee ought to be roasted. All is not lost however - more of this later. That's what it is. What it isn't is a production roaster. You won't build a business roasting with a Hottop. You may well be successful using it as a sample roaster, but it isn't built for production use. Why did I buy one?Simple. I decided I wanted to do home roasting, and tried using a popcorn popper. Once. I read a lot about other people's experiences with the available alternatives. From what I heard the Alpenröst seemed to be a reliability nightmare, and the Hearthwares were getting the usual mixed reviews. I then decided that if I wanted to do this thing, I might as well have something that did the best job I could expect for home roasting. This was in January 2003, when the Hottop wasn't quite shipping yet, but was in its final production form. The pre-production reviews I saw from 2002 were very encouraging and a well-known pundit hadn't yet started publicly panning the thing (for reasons which I subsequently found rather suspicious). A guy in Yorkshire claimed on his website that he was selling them, even back then. He wasn't, however, and simply ignored all attempts to contact him. After a while I gave up on him and I emailed Chang Yue (the manufacturers) directly. As luck would have it, they were coming to London to a trade show in a couple of weeks time, and they were bringing over a sample to show to punters at the show. They'd bring another one over just for me. What the hell - I figured if I didn't like it, there was enough interest to shift it on eBay. Probably. Price - $700 US, in cash, preferably in US currency. Ah well. On the 10th of February 2003, I pitched up at Olympia at the Asia Expo. This turned out to be a trade show, so in order to register I had to pretend to be in an appropriate business. I was Anise Coffee. I walked over to the Chang Yue stand, introduced myself to the charming Shelly and was given a long talk about the machine and the marketing challenges in N. America, a full demonstration and lots of coffee, both roasted and green. I walked out an hour or so later with a sizeable cardboard carton containing my new baby, happy and ready to roast my own coffee for ever more. Or not. We'd see. Carrying it across London back to my office in the City, and then subsequently home via the Tube and the usual High Speed Train was entertaining. |
