IRoast2 40011 5-2/7-Ounce Coffee-Bean Roaster, Black
by IBC - Hearthware, INC
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List Price: Category: Kitchen See more product details |
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Kitchen and Housewares Reviews of IRoast2 40011 5-2/7-Ounce Coffee-Bean Roaster, Black
Customer Review: Great roaster, but burned out after 2 years
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a fantastic home coffee roaster. It does a great job of roasting coffee with a minimum of smoke and mess. Put it on top of the stove with the exhaust fan on, and you will have no smoke at all in the house. The chaff collector does a superb job of collecting the "skins" that peel off when roasting, so you don't have any mess to clean up. You can program your own roast profiles, which makes it very customizable. There are several coffee lover sites on the web that have many suggested custom programming settings.
The coffee is produces is delicious, and since you can buy green coffee beans for less than 1/2 of what roasted beans cost, you will recoup your investment easily, and have better tasting coffee to boot.
On the bad side, the roaster finally burned up yesterday, and won't work any more. I roasted about 3 batches per week since I got it. From reading other people's experiences with this and other roasters, 2 years is about the average life expectancy for an air roaster, so I'm not particularly miffed that it died - it served me well for 2 years.
Will I buy the same unit to replace this one? No. Not because there is anything wrong with it - but there are newer roasters on the market which roast a much bigger batch of coffee at once, which means only one batch a week instead of 3. I plan to invest in a Behmor drum coffee roaster which is $100 more.
Customer Review: Great roaster---it has flaws, but it is still more than worth it
Summary: 5 Stars
If you read this, you probably already know that roasting your own coffee is likely the single largest improvement you can make to the quality of the coffee you drink at home, so I won't belabor that point.
I owned one for about two years before it broke (like another reviewer here), and I am going to get another one. So I obviously like it a lot. Nonetheless, I'll start with the downsides of this roaster:
1. It is noisy.
2. It requires attention to cleaning to function properly.
3. It produces quite a bit of smoke (but then again, it's coffee roasting we talk about).
4. It has a limited half-life (as mentioned, about two years of pretty heavy, almost daily, use in my case).
5. It's for small batch sizes (this might actually be a good thing in terms of coffee freshness, if you don't mind roasting a little more frequently).
6. It's user interface could be improved: more buttons, better display.
Now the upsides:
1. It's fast. Takes about 13-15 min to roast a batch.
2. Easy and fast to use, once you have figured out the buttons (not rocket science).
3. It's programmable---you can punch in your own roasting "curves" (step functions, really), tuned to particular beans or roasts. You can get as nerdy as you like about this, and people have...
From this it would seem that there are a lot more problems than good things to report about this roaster, but the bottom line is that this little device transforms coffee roasting into an activity that you can do on the side almost like boiling an egg, or you can invest a lot of time and attention in, sticking thermo sensors into the roast chamber and plotting temperature profiles.
The one thing to pay attention to is the flow of air through the chamber. Air is used to transport heat to the beans, and also to move them around. This makes the roaster mechanically simple (and hence cheap), but it also means that it needs to be kept clean enough to avoid any obstruction to the air flow. I let cleaning slide for some time, which resulted in the exhaust getting clogged, and the roaster overheating. In that case it does switch itself off, but I doubt it's a healthy thing for the machine, and I would not be surprised if those events hastened its demise.
It's relatively inexpensive, and it will provide you with many batches of deliciously fresh coffee. If you think about home roasting coffee, I recommend getting one of these.
Customer Review: Great tasting coffee, flimsy product
Summary: 2 Stars
I bought the iRoast2 as an upgrade for the Fresh Roast Plus that we had used for years. At first, I appreciated the more sophisticated roasting results we could get with the iRoast, and the fact that we could roast over double the amount of coffee per batch. However, after less than a year of moderate use, the glass roasting carafe cracked during the roasting process. I bit the bullet and ordered a replacement carafe from Hearthware. Now, less than 2 months later, the motor on the iRoast has given out. The fan stopped working mid-roast, causing the beans to overheat and a smoke disaster in the kitchen. So after just over 1 year of use, the product is shot.
Combining my experience and those of other reviewers here, obviously this product is not made to endure the test of time. This is an expensive product to provide just one year of use, not to mention the extra carafe I had to purchase. The Fresh Roast Plus, at half the price, is still going strong. I would not waste my money on another iRoast.
Customer Review: Horrible Customer Service
Summary: 1 Stars
The Hearthware IRoast2 is a reasonable coffee roaster although not very well constructed for what it costs.
There is a major problem with their customer service. It took them a month to send me the wrong part. When I called up after a couple of weeks to ask where the part was, they lied to me about when it had been shipped. It had in fact not been shipped at that point. They did agree to send the correct part UPS, but they said that it would take them 7 to 10 days to ship it. They said that there was no way that they could expedite the shipping which really says something about the company and its customer service.
The owner of the company did not reply to a letter complaining about the customer service. An exchange with a retailer who sells this product confirmed that their customer service is routinely atrocious. In spite of this, Hearthware will not allow the extremely efficient retailer to sell their parts. Hearthware won't supply their parts with any efficiency, and they won't let anyone else do it either.
The owner of the company does not seem to care what the customer service is like, and that is a big red warning flag. (Customer service, by the way, refused to give me the name of the owner. It was, of course, easy to find.)
If you look around in Amazon reviews, you will find numerous complaints about Hearthware customer service for its various products.
Customer Review: I roast 2
Summary: 3 Stars
I purchased the machine in December 2006.
I give it 5 stars for roasting. Each machine is different in terms of the temperature produced by the machine. Once you learn the amount of heat it produces, you can set the proper temperature and time for an even roast. It would be a great improvement if IRoast could standardize the amount of heat the unit produces.
The ability to change temperatures and control the amount of time for roasting are great features and has allowed me to produce some nice roasts. Once you find temperatures and times that produce a good roast for a particular type of bean, you can save the profile in the machine.
The machine definitely needs at least a half a day to cool down between roasts because of the high temperatures generated by the machine. After the roast is finished, the cover and glass top are too hot to handle with bare hands.
The BIG downside is the unreliability of the machine. I have had the glass pot crack and the blower in the base unit malfunctioned in the 4 months I have had the roaster. Customer Service is hit and miss.