You might have caught this next gadget on a late night infomercial. That's where I first saw it. I'm actually WAY more skeptical than most people are when it comes to these things. To me, if something sounds too good to be true, it ALWAYS is. The infomercial promised easy, freshly roasted coffee at home with no smoke and no mess. Coffee roasting for the average 'joe' (pun intended). So what's the deal with this kitchen gadget? Are the promises true? Read on grasshopper and all the facts will be be revealed.
As mentioned here before, I'm a coffee lover. There's nothing I like more than a great cup of coffee. With that in mind, I started to get sick of 'stale' coffee. You know, buy a pound or a 1/2 pound of coffee, and it's great for the first few pots but unless you consume the beans quickly, they start to lose their freshness in no time. Some people probably can't tell the difference. I definitely can. This led me on a quest for fresher coffee, and an easy to use coffee roaster. Did such a beast exist? Was there actually a consumer friendly coffee roaster, the kind promised by the Zach and Dani's infomercial?
I'm here to tell you that it does exist. My search on the web eventually led me to the
Sweet Maria's home coffee roasting site and their
review of the Zach and Dani's roaster. While the Sweet Maria's site isn't much to look at, and the name, well it doesn't say 'coffee' to me, the content there is great. So is the selection of roasters and beans. In their review they approached the roaster from a real coffee roasters angle. They roasted a large selection of beans, and offered recommendations of beans that fit the roasts that the Zach and Dani's roaster was good at. All of this information finally made me decide to try out coffee roasting myself, so I purchased a roaster and one of their sample coffee bean packs from them and I was off.
Before I go any further, let me explain, for those that don't know, why roasting your own green, or unroasted beans, can be a great thing. For one, you, the roaster, get to pick the roast to use. Whether you want a lighter roast, with it's brighter, more acidic flavor, or a darker, more robust roast, you are in control. Unroasted coffee beans also keep FAR longer than roasted ones. This is because once beans are roasted, they immediately start to get stale and bitter. Until you roast the beans though, they are almost perfect little coffee freshness packages, keeping fresh for months when stored in a cool dry place. When YOU are ready for coffee, all you do is roast up a batch and voila, fresh coffee. You also are granted access to an AMAZING array of coffee beans, more than you've ever heard of and way more than you will ever find at any commercial roaster.
OK so now that I've purchased and used the Zach and Dani's roaster for a while, how is it, really?
Let me first say that the setup is easy and the instructions are all very straight forward. When I roasted my first batch from the sample pack, I was very surprised at how quiet the Z&D roaster is. It's about as noisy as a hair dryer. Not bad at all. One of the big selling points of the Z&D roaster is lack of smoke when roasting. Unlike larger, more commercial roasters, the Z&D roaster is specifically designed for the kitchen, and has a catalytic converter that eliminates smoke. I found this to be totally true. During roasting, all you really get is a kind of pop-corny smell at first, then a sweet, almost chocolate-syrupy smell. There is no smoke and virtually no lingering odor after roasting. Because all major parts, except of course the base, are dishwasher-safe, clean up is quick and easy. The only thing you really have to deal with are small pieces of chaff around the roaster itself.
Now for what you are most likely waiting to read. Just how is the coffee from this thing anyway? In a word... great. I mean really. The selection in the sample pack has a tasty range of beans. Tasty? Yep, because when you start roasting from the myriad of beans available you quickly realize that like wine grapes, there is an amazing variety of flavors to be found in coffee beans. My first batch was roasted using setting 24, as suggested by Sweet Maria's. While I enjoyed it quite a lot, to me it was brighter and more acidic than I like. Upping the roast to 26 or 27 resulted in my perfect cup of coffee. It was a tad darker, and more robust, just how I like it. I was impressed. I was very, very happy with my purchase. I can now highly recommend the Zach and Dani's home roaster. Believe it or not, it's the real deal. Freshly roasted coffee in the home.
That said, was there anything I DIDN'T like about the roaster? There were a couple. One, the roast size is small. You can get roughly one 12 cup pot from a roasted batch. If you drink a lot of coffee, or are roasting coffee for more than one person, you'll find yourself roasting a lot. Two, the roaster has to cool down completely between batches, so that each batch can be roasted to perfection. If you don't wait, you won't know exactly what to results to expect. This causes roasting more than one batch at a time to be more time consuming. Overall though, my gripes are small.
In closing I recommend reading the entire Sweet Maria's
review. It is filled with a lot more information than is found here, and a lot of tips, like taking the beans out of the roaster immediately when it stops to hurry their cooling. I think that ultimately I will want a larger roaster, but the Zach and Dani's roaster is the prefect starting point for anyone interested in roasting their own coffee at home.
For more information, I recommend the
Sweet Maria's site which is filled with lots of roasting information, and features a great selection of roasters and coffee beans that you can order, and the Zach and Dani's
home site. Additionally, for the perfect coffee maker for your freshly roasted coffee, I highly recommend the Black & Decker Infuze Vacuum Coffee maker, as reviewed
here previously.
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