Want to Build Your Own Small Coffee Roaster? Here’s a Rough Blueprint

With minds and hearts open to trial and error methodology, obsessive coffee tinkerers and friends of Daily Coffee News Frans Goddijn (of the blog Kostverlorenvaart) and Tije de Jong have created a totally functional, small fluid-bed coffee roasting machine composed almost entirely of affordable and readily available parts.

While not afraid to chronicle their failed experiments — see this attempt at roasting with direct sunlight — they have also found their successes, as in espresso-machine-steam-poaching eggs, or in motorizing a hand grinder with Fiat parts. Goddijn shared with us video of an elementary fluid-bed roaster, including a common kitchen sieve for the bed, nearly a year ago. While the results were promising, some elements like chaff collection required more development.

Now Goddin and de Jong, along with electronics guru Jan van der Weel, have unveiled a more mature version of the handmade roaster, sharing a rough blueprint of the design in keeping with their collective open-source mentality.

Featuring various components of steel, wood, glass and aluminum, the roaster also employs individual electronic components made available by Arduino — cheekily labeled on the blueprint as “hocus pocus” — and successfully ties into Artisan open-source roasting software for tracking or controlling crucial elements such as bean temp, air flow and rate of rise.