Got My New Gene!

[cd]

I bought a new Gene Cafe roaster on the weekend from Di Bartoli (Bondi junction, NSW). I was really impressed with the service and help that I received. I went in there on Saturday afternoon and they were roasting in a Gene when I arrived so it was good to see it in action before I bought one. The guys were very informative and the 5% coffeesnobs discount was much appreciated.

The machine is extremely simple to use - even though I managed to burn my first roast! My second roast was pretty good for a complete novice. Good colour & very even roast - it can only get better from here.

CD

[thegoodies]

Re: Got My New Gene!

Congrats cd,
yes the enjoyment of roasting your own coffee at home is certainly an infectious one. I too have bought a Gene cafe but more so to perform sample roasts as I also have a Toper 5kg which is a bit hard to roast 250g of coffee in without burning the hell out of it.

Take notes on temperature settings, FC timings and temperatures and roast length. Also an idea to maybe create a way of cooling the beans a little quicker as the Gene does take a whille to get them back to room temp. Check out bean coolers in other threads for ideas. If you can stop the roast quicker that what the Gene currently does then this will reduce the likely hood over over roasting or take a bit of guess work out of when to pull the roast to maintain the correct degree of roast that you are after.

Have Fun,
The Goodies

[cd]

Re: Got My New Gene!

Thanks for the advice. At this stage I can use all the help I can get but I think Ill have fun learning! I take your point about the time that Gene takes to cool - besides the obvious downside of the roast continuing as the beans cool, if you get the timing right are there any other problems associated with a longer cooling period?

CD

[rynnlic]

Re: Got My New Gene!

Yahoo! I got my new Gene Cafe too!
Thanks to site sponsors Avacuppa who were exemplary in their communication and prompt with their service. Their website and wiki was so useful once I had taken the time to read the information to address my lack of understanding that was making me tear my hair out! As is often said RTFM, baby. Highly recommend buying from them - and I told them so!! I remain, at this stage, greener than my beans!!  ;D
Not for long tho

[greenman]

Re: Got My New Gene!

Quote: "so!! I remain, at this stage, greener than my beans!! Grin
Not for long tho " unquote---

You will be producing amazing roasts in no time, enjoy your new roaster, wed love to sample some of your beans at the next beanbay pickup!!!!

[friskhr]

Re: Got My New Gene!

I got a gene 2 weeks back!

Roasted 3 times but is still exploring results varied. Got a good roast with the 3rd attempt.

Wondering what gene users think about pre-heating? Some say a couple of minutes of preheating and some say dive straight in? Thank you

[KJM]

Re: Got My New Gene!

I used to whack them straight in when I first got mine. My roasts were basically OK, but one day it stopped heating up so fast. From that day on, I pre-heated.

Pre-heating makes your roasts more consistent and helps put enough heat into the beans.

My standard procedure is to heat to 250C, hit the emergency stop and fill the drum and start the roast from there. This is the only way I can get to FC at a reasonable time. For my Gene, and for most beans, I set the initial temp (after the 250C pre-heat) to 250C. Get FC starting between 9:30 and 10:00. without the pre-heat, the onset of FC is delayed a fair bit. Again, for my Gene and for most of the beans I roast, I turn the heat back to 228C at around 10:30 and 11:00.

I know a few local roasters with Genes and they have adopted this process pretty much too. Works well. Worth a try!

/Kevin

[friskhr]

Re: Got My New Gene!

Thank you KJM

Roasted 200g of brasil today.

Temp set at 250 degrees
First crack at 10.5 minutes
Then dialed temp back to 230 degrees
Second crack 15/16 minutes

Attach is picture of the beans. Any advice for newbie here please?

[KJM]

Re: Got My New Gene!

OK - I should have also said I do 250g batches.... So your times are different. Sorry. Mea Culpa :-[

From the piccy, it looks like you might have actually gone a bit fast - a couple of the beans with their bums facing the camera (bottom LHS of the top RH quadrant) have what looks like a bit of tipping - slightly burnt-ish looking ends. This might be a trick of the light too.

In my limited experience, each Gene varies a bit with respect to temperature. In mine, as I said, I drop the temp to 228C (or 225C or 223C - depending on the beans). My preferred tipple are African beans, and Ethiopian and Yemeni ones at that. Those tend to be pretty hard and are able to cope with heat. If youre doing soft beans, you might like to drop the pre-heat temp to 240C or so. Thatll make it take slightly longer to get to FC, but you lower the risk of tipping etc. The rate of heating is proportional to the temperature difference, essentially.

Without wishing to incur the wrath of the moderators - Home Barista has a terrific pictorial resource on what to look for in roasting - http://www.home-barista.com/home-roasting/roasting-defects-pictorial-t13587.html - although the photographs dont necessarily look entirely like real-life. But it gets you a pretty darn good idea of what to look for.

Just getting back to what I said about how I do roasts, the other thing I stupidly forgot to say is that I dump the beans into an external cooler. If youre doing 1 roast, you just emergency stop, dump the beans (being careful not to burn the pinkies) and then put the drum back, spin the blue knob to get non-zero time up and double press the red button to make it cool itself down.

When you emergency stop, the fan keeps going - so the heating element is cooled and the electronics in the Gene also get some cooling action. Emergency stop should not hurt the machine in any way at all. When you take yours to bits to clean the inside out after a hundred or so roasts, youll see exactly what I mean. After I took mine to bits for the first time, I realised the emergency stop feature wont do anything to damage the machine, as long as you do a cool down cycle afterwards (otherwise the heat-soak from the drum and exit end might heat the electronics bit just a tad too much and dry your capacitors out....).

It takes a few roasts to dial in on a technique that is ~100% repeatable. One of the guys with a Gene over here in Adelaide roasted the same beans as I did on the same morning. I dropped the temp to 224C, he had his at 232C. Thats a big difference, but the beans came out basically identical. The individual "genetic variation" ;D ;D ;D seems to account for the diffs. So youll need to play a bit and see, I think.

Glad it was able to help (maybe)!

Cheers
/Kevin