My Third Alpenrost

Let me start by saying I like the Alp and use if for most of my roasts. I still use a Fresh Roast+ for smaller batches or if I need to be extra careful with tracking a particular roast color, etc.

My first Alp stopped working after two roasts. My second Alp stopped working during the first roast. My third Alp seems to be working fine. Swissmar was very quick to send replacements (sending the new one even before they had picked up the defective machine). They paid for all postage. UPS picked up the old ones at my front door.

The biggest advantage to the Alp is the roast size. If you're tired of multiple back to back roasts with smaller roasters, the Alp is for you. I drink enough drip coffee and espresso to still justify 3 or 4 back to back roasts with the Alp and am pleased with the 8oz roast size.

Pros: roast size, looks of machine, noise level, ease of directing smoke

Cons: difficult to roast by sight, harder to clean than smaller roasters, very long roasts - 20 minutes and still not to the second crack (some double roasts needed, more on this later), more than a few folks have needed replacements prior to getting one that worked well.

Most of the "Cons" are easily overcome. This machine forces you to roast by crack sounds, time, smoke, smell, or roasting profiles learned from earlier roasts. Once you get the hang of it, it's fairly easy to get a good roast with just about any bean.

I've learned each machine is different. My particular machine took a very long time to get to the second crack with some kinds of beans. So long in fact, that I needed to "double roast" before I fixed the problem. It would take 12 minutes into the second roast to hit the second crack. (kind of negates the time savings of the larger roast size) I read about a fix, implemented it, and sped up the roast profile. An allen wrench can adjust the temp setting via a circuit card accessible from the bottom of the machine. You can easily change the roast temp setting in just a few minutes. Now I always get to the second crack during the first roast. Problem solved.

I use 6 inch aluminum exhaust duct to route the Alp smoke out a cardboard cutout I place in the kitchen window. The aluminum can be "molded" around the exhaust vent of the Alp for a fairly tight seal. My wife no longer complains about the smoke as she does when I use the FR+. (I let the FR+ vent to the kitchen exhaust fan over the stove - the kind that exhausts to the outside.)

All in all I'm glad I got the Alp. I use it religously and team it with my Rancilio Rocky grinder, Rancilio Miss Sylvia espresso machine, and Capresso Team Luxe drip machine.

Bottom line: I highly recommend this machine. I had some roasting experience with the FR+ and I believe this helped me to get consistantly good roasts with the Alp. There may be a slight learning curve for someone starting out with the Alp as their first roaster.

[Friday, March 07, 2003]

A very nice machine with a few flaws

I believe that this is the only drum-style home roaster on the market. It has an elegant design, and the primary advantage is that it will roast 8 ounces at a time, which is more than two and a half times more than the available fluid-bed (hot air) machines. For my tastes, this supplies me with 9-cups for five days. The operation is simple, but the clean-up is slightly harder than for the hot-air machine.

Customer service from the Swissmar distributor has been excellent, showing a responsiveness seldom found today. To date, they have replaced the machine twice, paying all shipping charges. This brings us to the problems. While the roasting time (not including the cooling cycle) has ranged from 15-18 minutes, the beans can easily go from a medium-dark roast to completely burned within a 30-second period at the end of the roasting period. The machine has roast selections ranging from 1 to 15,with 1 corresponding to 16 1/2 minutes and each higher number increases the time by an additional 15 seconds. The mid-range setting (8) is labeled as medium and it is often recommended on their packages of beans. However, all three machines that I have tried will burn the beans to a black, smokey, crisp at that setting, leaving a burned oily residue over the entire inside of the machine. Experience finally taught me that the operation is highly sensitive to ambient temperature. At normal indoor household temperatures, I must manually trigger the cooling cycle at 15-16 minutes if I do not to burn the beans beyond recognition. This is less than the time for the lowest setting (1). Outside at (62-67) degrees, it may take up to 18 minutes (setting #7) for beans from the same bag. I exchanged the first machine because I concluded that it must have had a bad timer or heat control. When the second one worked the same way, I decided to live with it, watching carefully and manually timing the roasts with a stopwatch. The second machine began to develop cracks on the front of the plastic cover and the plastic hinges on the rear eventually broke off. Now, I am being especially careful with the third machine to avoid leaning the cover back against the build-in hinge stops without something else to prop it up.

The quality and consistency of the roast appears to be inferior to my fluid-bed roaster (Hearthware), which reliably brings every bean in a batch to exactly the same degree of roast. Batches from the Alpenrost will typically have beans ranging over a fairly wide range of color, sometimes even dumping a green bean. This isn't necessarily bad, as there is some merit to having the mix of flavors from come from the different degrees of roast.

Despite the annoyances of not being able to view the roast (without opening the machine which cools the beans and exhausts acrid smoke into the room) and having to guess at the roasting times, I am using the Alpenrost 90% of the time, mostly because of the larger batch size.

Be aware that the roaster will blow out a significant amount of smoke, especially at the end of the heating cycle, which is characteristic of all consumer roasters. If you are indoors, you must have a way of directing the outflow to a powered outside vent. The Alpenrost's outflow nozzle works especially well with the Jenn-Aire exhaust.

If you don't mind having to fuss a little bit and enjoy monitoring the roasing process, then get this nifty coffee roaster.

[Sunday, October 29, 2000]