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Coffee roaster test. This roaster was the most simple setup I could come up with to test air flow and heat characteristics for a "fluid bed" hot air roaster I am designing and have most of the way built. I only set this up to do testing and never intended to leave it together and roast coffee with it. It does an incredibly good job of roasting coffee so I may continue working on it if I have time.

Roaster and cooler:

One hp fan and 160,000 btu turkey roaster burner: Roast times vary dramatically depending on air flow. I can easily achieve 6 min roast times to French Roast with 1 lb of green, or 9 to 10 min roast time with 1 1/2 lbs green. I have roasted 2 3/4 pounds of green in one batch but it took quite a bit of air flow to keep suspended and took about 20 or so minutes to roast, I think it was more than this design could handle so I have kept the batches at 1 1/2 pounds.

I used this fan because it was just sitting around the shop, it is much larger than you need ! I was adjusting the air flow while roasting and opened the flap a little to quickly and turned the roaster into a coffee cannon, shooting more than a pound of very hot coffee beans all over the place and me. The inlet is a 6 inch pipe, you can see that most of the opening is closed off, except for about 1 to 1 1/2 inches.

Coffee Cooler: Stainless Steel colander on an Angel Food cake pan with the center removed attached to the fan with drive screws. This unit works quite well, 1 1/4 lbs of coffee cool in about 1 or so minutes.

Top View: Notice the high tec baffle on the top, green coffee requires more air to stay suspended so the air flow rate needs to be slowed down a little as the coffee roasts to stay hot enough to achieve second crack. It also deflects the hot air so you can look at the coffee while its roasting. The roast chamber is 5 inch galvanized pipe with a 5 to 4 reducer on the top, if you build something like this you should use stainless steel for anything that the coffee will come in contact with. Aluminum window screen was used for the bottom of the roast chamber.