Behmor 1600 Plus - Coffee Roaster

[ElShauno]

Well, I finally got my Behmor 1600 Plus and have completed three batches in it. What a beauty! The beans have been SUBLIME compared to what I was able to achieve in my popper, and this is only having used P2 so far while I come to terms with the roaster.

I know it's normally CS faux pax, but I've been using the beans fresh off the roast (well, maybe an hour or so of resting) and they taste great. I also haven't been seeing the bubbles I saw with my popper-roasted beans when using them so fresh.

I bought my Behmor from Chris at Talk Coffee, so I've tried a 300g batch of his P2 blend, which came out slightly darker than the sample he gave me (but was still delicious), a Columbian decaf (from another supplier), and my own blend, which so far includes: 60% Brazil Yellow Bourbon (Bean Bay), 20% Australian Green Cauldron Estate (other supplier), and Panama Hacienda Estate (other supplier).

This was actually my very first roast post burn-in, and while it came out lighter than I normally like, it is lovely in milk, and far better than what I achieved with the popper. Although I think I'll be substituting the Aussie bean for another.

Special mention to the Finance Minister at home for approving the purchase and allowing me to enjoy my new-found hobby. Looking forward to perfecting my blends!

[TC]

Congrats Elshauno and thank salso for supporting us.

Looks like you're progressing well!

Do keep some of each roast so that you can try them as they age and work our how you like to drink them. They will often be way better in a week or so and you may be missing something.

Happy times...

Chris

[Rolf]

has anybody a wiring diagram for the Behmor?

[GeoffreyT]

Hello Andy,

Can you please give me a quote to send one "Upgrade Kit" to Belgium ? I can't put my adress in Beanbay

A big thank's in advance,

Geoffrey

[Andy]

Yes, BeanBay is only for Australian addresses.

Please use the [Contact us] at the bottom of the page if you want it sent overseas. Please include your shipping address and email address and I'll get a postage quote and email you an invoice.

[GeoffreyT]

Great !

Thank you ;-)

[PhilMac]

New panel arrived with the beans...thanks Andy :-)

Not fiddly at all....compared to model helicopters.

Honestly, took about 1/2 hour max and very easy

[Flynnyfalcon]

New panel arrived with the beans...thanks Andy :-)

Not fiddly at all....compared to model helicopters.

Honestly, took about 1/2 hour max and very easy

Mine arrived too, thanks Andy. I'm pretty good with my hands, but 3 large Single Malts, I reckon an hour passed from start to finish :-)

Good news though, it works and currently mid roast ;-)

[bodyboardingbum]

it works and currently mid roast ;-)

Hope you're not being naughty, and doing other things while roasting? :P
Isn't that the golden rule? "thou shall not be distracted while roasting".

[FGOB]

I have just had the morning from hell.

Let me say from the very start it was an RTFM problem and all my fault.

It started last week with the arrival of my shiny new Behmor Plus Metric Upgrade panel. It arrived without any fitting instructions or manual but what the heck, who reads those anyway. It said on the order page that all you needed was a long and short Phillips Screwdriver . You take off the side, then the top and Bob's your uncle.

So I attacked the Behmor and took out all the screws I could find and the bloody thing would still not come apart. I tipped it over and there were six scews underneath. Four Phillip were no problem...BUT... there were two Torx scews. Now I have a set of Torx screwdrivers which I have used to upgrade the memory in my Macbook in the past but having searched the shed, the house and every drawer in the house and couldn't fund them,so I left the semi-disassembled Behmor on the bench and got on with other stuff waiting for a chance to go buy a Torx screwdriver.

On Sunday night I realised there was a crisis. My wife had used the last of the roasted coffee and Monday morning was now looming with the prospect of no morning coffee.

I ripped the house apart and eventually located the Torx screwdrivers and finished the installation of the new control panel with relatively little effort. ( except for the screw in the far corner at the bottom of the panel which after half an hour of stuffing about I decided to forget about )

All reassembled I loaded in 400 g of my best Rwanda and began roasting while I was cooking dinner. Just as the coffee was starting to smell great at about first crack the panel started flashing something and by the time I got to the machine it was in "Error 7" and cooling down.

OK, so I binned it and decided to have another go in a few hours time after dinner.

At about 10 pm I loaded 200g of beans in and decided to watch it like a hawk this time. Same story as last time but this time I am seeing weird "U" symbol and and a countdown going-on on the screen.I start stabbing buttons at random hoping to save it but eventually I got the dreaded " error 7" and it went into a cooling mode and I could do nothing to stop it.

I am tired. I am cranky and I dump the half roasted beans into a jar and head off to bed.

At 6 am this morning I wake up needing caffeine. I make two cups of tea. Its not doing anything for me. I look at the half-roasted beans. I pour some into my grinder which seizes up because of the the hard half roasted beans.

By this time I am not in a good place. The builders have arrived and are doing something with an angle grinder on the roof. ( Did I mention I am in the middle of renovations)

I make another cup of fudking tea and decide its time to RTFM. I can find nothing on Coffee Snobs possibly because I am not thinking straight.

I go to the US Behmor site and download a manual. Its a manual for the old Behmor not the Plus. I go back and search through the confusing polyglot array of manuals until I stumble upon something called "quick start" which is actually the correct manual.

At last I find out why I have no coffee. The evil ba**ards have added a new nanny feature which means that unless you punch the start button again when you see the countdown at 75 percent of roast time to prove you are watching the panel carefully it punishes you by switching to cooling and ruining your beans.

I load another 400 g of green into the Behmor and sit transfixed on the control panel with my finger hovering over the start button.

Then everything stops. The lights go out. The builders have turned off the power. Another 400g wasted.

I briefly consider assaulting the builders but they are a lot younger and fitter than me. Instead,totally defeated ,I begin walking to Chatswood to look for a decent cafe. The builders have my car blocked in but I can't wait for them to move their trucks......I NEED A COFFEE.

[Bazooka]

Dont waste the par roasted err7 beans, it still can taste great with further roasting, its my new roasting profile on those odd occasions when i get distracted

[Rumo]

Andy thanks a lot for the notification, I know I requested it but I am still weighing the pros and cons of upgrading. I need to be able to control the elements as the standard system truly is a bit limiting but I can't imagine putting up with the new Err7 feature. I'm already in serious danger of getting stuck on the wrong side of the cooling process not necessarily because I don't monitor my roasts but because I don't monitor my dial . Err7 willl make that much, much worse as we've seen above. I'm sure the plus V2 will beep instead of flashing which will make things easier.

Those of you who have been through the upgrade, you don't happen to have a photo of the connector to the elements by any chance, do you? I'm thinking of highjacking that line and controlling via an external dimmer - giving me 0-100% as a continuous scale instead of going for the upgrade anf getting 25% increments. I've planned to mod the thing for a while now and I think this is giving me the perfect opportunity - for a reversible mod, that is.

[bodyboardingbum]

My 2c for everyone who is complaining about the countdown timer, and Error 7.

I've only got 12 roasts on my Behmor 1600 Plus since delivery, but not once have i encountered the Error 7 or found it to be even a slight inconvenience. A roast cycle only takes ~13minutes, so if i don't have 13minutes free, i don't start the roast. It's pretty simple! As a backup, i always set a timer via my iPhone for 70% of the roast timer, so on the very slight chance something happens to distract me, i will be reminded when my iPhone alarm goes off with ~30seconds to spare. Easy done!

If you're using the Rosetta Stone feature, half the time i don't even encounter the countdown because pressing the "c" button at first crack will bypass the Error 7 countdown timer anyway

Edit: Ha! There's a sneaky auto-text substitution from the proverbial "2-cents" to "second crack", when posting.

[FGOB]

I was an early adopter if the Behmor and I love it. I always stick close to the machine and use my nose to detect when the roast is almost ready. I also listen for the cracks and the afterburner turning on.

I always roast the max weight and don't intend to sit watching the screen for the whole 20 plus minutes of the roast and I find having to go press the start button within a 30 second window annoying.

It's early days yet and I may get used to it. I am using the iPhone timer to give me a reminder.

Perhaps I will put the old control panel in next time I open it up for a good clean or perhaps I will have come to love the extra control and Rosetta too much. Let's see.

[Rumo]

I don't actually fully understand what the rosetta is for and that's probably because I'm lucky in that I never roast indoors. Especially with the popper.

I smell, watch the window and listen too and have my own inbuilt timer. I typically pre-heat the BM for 1-1.5 minutes. When I don't use P2, I open the door at 1c because I can't dim the elements (my experience has been that ET has relatively little impact since the radiant heat from the elements is so strong) and I use an external pedestal fan blowing into the BM for cooling because the BM cooling is too slow. There is some moderate coasting so sometimes I do stop it, take the cage out as quickly as I can (1-2 seconds) and then re-start the cooling with the BM empty. I then cool the beans on top of a fan blowing upwards through a stainless colander/basket. I believe my BM is and has always been a tad out of whack anyway, because I would typically roast about 170 grams using 1lb standard settings as this is what will give me a 2c at 14-15 minutes.

So to summarise, my Behmor is a heating device with a spinning cage that stings my fingers, and everything else is workarounds that I apply to get around Behmor's features. Now I need to opt between modding it or adding a couple more features out of which one would be great and the other has a big chance of becoming a great annoyance. That's not so easy.

I think the revised panel gets postponed for the moment and it's screwdriver time this weekend to inspect the element connectors and see what the options are there?