After pacing up and down the house for a week while waiting for Australian customs to clear the parcel, UPS finally delivered the roaster to me yester

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1 Gene Café CBR-101 CoffeeSnobs Roaster Review Roaster: Gene Café CBR-101 Manufacturer: Genesis Co. Ltd. Korea. Phone: Fax: Reviewer: Andy Freeman Date: October 2005 Document:

2 After pacing up and down the house for a week while waiting for Australian customs to clear the parcel, UPS finally delivered the roaster to me yesterday and I took no time at all getting it out of the packaging to have a play. Printed on the front of this roaster is GENE CAFÉ COFFEE BEAN ROASTER INNOVATIVE OFF-AXIS ROTATION CRB-101 and that is exactly what is it, innovative. Many of the roasters appearing on the market at the moment are merely a re-package of a similar design. The Gene Café cannot be described as that, it is a fluid-bed hot-air roaster that incorporates a rotating drum action that ensures the beans are moved both in a rolling action and from end to end within the drum. This creates a perfectly even roasting and the chaff gets moved out of the drum with the blow-through heated air. Innovative indeed. Anyway, below is a pictorial review of this new toy for the CoffeeSnobs membership, enjoy! The box arrives: It is always a nervous moment, you sign for the parcel that has just flown from the other side of the world and carefully cut the tape on top. Will you find a pile of parts? How rough was the courier? Was it used to support 3 ton of other parcels in the plane? Then the moment of relief when all appears to be perfect inside and your anxiousness is turned into excitement at the prospect of playing with a new and unusual coffee roaster.

3 The Gene Café CBR-101 is a neat package with clearly marked and well placed controls. The bulk of the materials used are heat resistant plastic, and a something close to a modern bakelite around the glass barrel and its supporting ends. The smoke and chaff muffler at the exhaust exit is made from a cast aluminium alloy. I m not too sure what the manufacturer calls it but I ll refer to it as the muffler. The round end-cap is removable with a quarter turn to empty the chaff contents. The shiny metal strip in the second picture it full of small holes that do a great job of allowing the smoke to escape and the chaff to stay in. It is the best built and best action chaff catcher that I have ever used. The chaff which is often the source of half the smoke in home roasters is removed from the beans and ends-up in here as opposed to smouldering away inside the roaster which can strongly affect the final cupping result.

4 This is what the setup looks like. In the foreground of picture 1 is the glass roasting barrel sitting neatly in its holder with the lid open ready for addition of beans. The second picture is it with the lid closed and the last shows it in the roaster ready to go. Due to the off-axis design of the barrel there are no square surfaces for it to stand it up without the holder. You can see the barrel holder by itself in the foreground of picture three. Being an early shipment the roaster it did not come with an Australian 240 volt plug. Luckily I had access to an after-hours electrician who was only too happy to make sure that I didn t have to jamb two forks in the power-point (a joke of course!!!). Future shipments of the Gene Café should come with the correct plug so this step will not be necessary.

5 The Gene Café CBR101 also comes with a measuring cup. I tried weighing 4 very different bean varieties in this cup (Colombian, Timor, Peru and Nicaraguan) and all were different screen grading sizes. Every time the level cup weighed 100gm 105gm so I would be pretty happy not using the scales for future roasts and just measuring the 3 level cups into the barrel for 300gm-315gm per roasting batch. If you own an atomic nanogram scale and want an extremely accurate weight in every batch then go ahead, I ll just use the plastic cup thanks. Show me the gizzards! With the lid off you can see the engineering that makes this roaster work. The two toothed disks at either end of the roaster hold the glass barrel. Both the inlet and the exhaust have temperature probes that constantly check the heated air and provide an average to the L.E.D. display on the front of the roaster and of course to the thermostat so that the heater element gets turned off when the preset temperature is reached. The inlet side has a alloy cast heating chamber that the fan blows through to roast the beans. All of the other hot areas have been made from a modern bakelite type composite that shows no sign of heat damage or wear after the first 12 roasts so I would expect it to have a long service life.

6 The circuit boards in this were a pleasant surprise after seeing some other (sometimes leading brand name) manufacturer s pitiful excuses for electronics. These have been screened in English, are well laid out and very well soldered. All of the wiring was well insulated and cable tied neatly out of the way. All of the peripheral sensors (reed, temperature etc) were connected to the circuit board using plugs and sockets making any future repair or warranty claim a simple and quick process and the temperature probes were glass fibre shielded to contain any transmitted heat. It really is nice to find good electronics in modern equipment. The fully enclosed fan that provides the air movement that makes this work. The fan runs very quiet and draws its air from under the roaster through a simple wire mesh. Please don t cover-up the air-intake or attempt to stick objects into the fan kiddies.

7 So here is the roaster with its clothes back on and 315 grams of Peru Kontiki green beans were tipped into the roaster. You turn the roaster on by pressing the blue knob down. The temperature was set to 232 Celsius by turning the red knob and the time set to 19 minutes by turning the blue knob. Time can be set up to 30 minutes using single decimal increments ie: 13.2 minutes or 13.3 minutes. Temperature increments are in single degrees. The roasting process starts when the red knob is pressed and if you want to cool the roast early (abort abort ) you can press the red knob again. During the roast cycle the red LED display toggles between the actual and the set temperature which makes it really easy to create a profile graph of each roast. Clear as mud? Well it really is easy to use. At anytime during the roast you can adjust or change both the time and the temperature to get the perfect roasting profile. You can see in the second picture the great colour and evenness of this 19/232 Peru Kontiki roast. At the end of the roasting cycle the machine beeps to tell you the cooling is starting. If you need to cook a little longer then just adjust the time and it will revert to heating again else the cooling cycle starts. The cooling cycle turns the heater off and just runs the fan while tumbling the beans in its mesmerising off-axis action. The cooling period is dependant on the temperature and stops when the beans get to 60C. Ambient temperature will greatly affect this time period but I was seeing 8-9 min cooling cycles with 50% of the temperature lost in the first five minutes.

8 Below are three actual roasting profiles. The first profile (below) was the c. that was mentioned in the above review. The temperature quoted here was read from the LED display on the Gene Café and I noted the figures every minute during the roast to create these graphs. All were stopped just when second crack was starting.

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10 Gene Café CBR-101 Review Summary For those of you that jump to the last page of a review without reading it here is my top ten list of the pros and cons of this roasting machine. TOP TEN LIKES: 1. Simple and easy to use. 2. Large 315gm green bean weight per roast. 3. Good controls (two knobs that also act as buttons when pressed) 4. Quiet (you can whisper over the running machine) 5. Bright and easy to read LED displays in both red and green. 6. Neat, clean and clever catchment of chaff. 7. Awesome visibility of the beans while roasting. 8. Easy cleaning. 9. Mesmerising rotating action (that could put you to sleep!) 10. Enough tweak ability for any CoffeeSnob or CoffeeGeek. TOP TEN DISLIKES: 1. Cooling cycle seems a little long (although cupping of the roasted beans were fine) 2. Ummm I do struggle for number 2 3. It only comes in black??!?!? 4. Does that count? 5. It isn t free! 6. It doesn t make espresso! 7. Mesmerising rotating action (that could put you to sleep!) 8. Can I use that in both lists or is that cheating? 9. Landed RRP price in Australia is not yet known. 10. Its not yet available (but is coming SOON) It really is a struggle to write the top ten dislikes. This is a very easy roaster to use, it allows me to set and forget or fiddle and tweak and the 315gm (green) batch size will provide 250gm of roasted coffee in just half an hour from start to end and then the roaster is ready for another batch. When you get the chance to try one of these roasters and the output from it I m sure you will be pleasantly surprised at the results. Andy Freeman