so has anyone pre-ordered?

I am sorely tempted but will sit in the peanut gallery on this one waiting for the obfuscation clouds to dissipate. It really does look too good to pass up!

My main concern is the conduction only paradigm. It isn't that there are no "mainly conductive heat" large roasters still out there, but reading all the books and all the blogs one gets the sense that they are very hard to control to avoid roasting defects like scorching, tipping and burnt smoky aromas.

That is not to say pan roasting (nearly 100% conduction) isn't popular - at least in some parts of the world - just that it isn't what I am looking for.

Standard roasters are (supposedly) 80% convection and 20% conduction. Maybe these guys have figured it out how to leverage high BTU from conduction without the control issues and flavor defects.

Just looked it up on the web, as I'm in for a roaster to do away with the hassle of mail ordering beans and tinker some more and started drooling seeing this one.

Their website currently only has three sales contacts, and the danish one only has the gene cafe roaster listed (On sale, But still much more expensive than what I could find so far) and their UK sales point also has nothing on this new baby yet.

Let's wait for some results first, not saying it's vaporware but it sure is early days...

AssafL wrote:I am sorely tempted but will sit in the peanut gallery on this one waiting for the obfuscation clouds to dissipate. It really does look too good to pass up!

My main concern is the conduction only paradigm. It isn't that there are no "mainly conductive heat" large roasters still out there, but reading all the books and all the blogs one gets the sense that they are very hard to control to avoid roasting defects like scorching, tipping and burnt smoky aromas.

That is not to say pan roasting (nearly 100% conduction) isn't popular - at least in some parts of the world - just that it isn't what I am looking for.

Standard roasters are (supposedly) 80% convection and 20% conduction. Maybe these guys have figured it out how to leverage high BTU from conduction without the control issues and flavor defects.

This is just a wild guess, but I'm guessing that if this design works, the roast quality will be comparable to a perforated drum electric roaster. You'll have conduction and at least long wavelength infrared heating, plus whatever convection heating the minimal airflow through the mechanically fluidized bed can provide.

My concern is less with the technology and methodology; I think this thing will probably turn green coffee brown. My concern would be that they appear to be attempting to pre-sell to either generate cash for production or to lure outside investment. Neither of which is guaranteed to generate enough cash to overcome inevitable production unknowns.

Overall though, this is a very clever design that overcomes the latent heat lag problem of conventionally electrically heated roasters. If I could figure out who to talk to and they convinced me they had a reasonable plan, I'd consider investing to help them get it off the ground.

Have a feeling you would want to start at their Danish sales contact listed on the web to hear from them who they are in contact with, the company seems to center itself in Asia but the design is said to be Danish.

millcityroasters wrote:This is just a wild guess, but I'm guessing that if this design works, the roast quality will be comparable to a perforated drum electric roaster. You'll have conduction and at least long wavelength infrared heating, plus whatever convection heating the minimal airflow through the mechanically fluidized bed can provide....

Overall though, this is a very clever design that overcomes the latent heat lag problem of conventionally electrically heated roasters. If I could figure out who to talk to and they convinced me they had a reasonable plan, I'd consider investing to help them get it off the ground.

I don't know if I agree to part 1. I think more of pan roasted... Induction is indeed quick and powerful and indeed solves latency issues (I personally have 12kW of pro Cooktek induction burners at home I adore).

The control is tricky. At 1500w induction (assuming 80% efficiency) you are talking about roughly ~4000 BTU which compared with gas would be a 10,000 BTU burner (at 40% efficiency). Which should be ample for 1kg of green beans. Awesome! gotta love the energy and speed.

So now : If you dump 4000BTU onto a small drum (frying pan) and just let the drum heat up, at full power it will become Steak searing hot very quickly (exceeding the temp for roasting). So regulate the drum temp - okay - you may avoid the fire hazard but then you no longer have 4000BTU being delivered so you'll be underpowered.

So the question with control is how to deliver the 4k BTU into the beans without flash burning the beans?

Undoubtedly, having the proverbial "adult in the room" with experience making coffee roasters would get more of us off the fence and into the (induction heated) frying pan.

That's a well reasoned and fairly well calculated argument, but I'm pretty sure the answer is to turn the frying pan into a drum and agitate the beans while drawing air through the system thus distributing the heat evenly throughout the bean mass.

Look, I'm not all that interested in proclaiming the Aillio a success, but I am saying most of what you have identified falls more into the engineering "job" category than the engineering "problem" category.

My intent is always positive. I - and I think everyone else here - wants them to succeed (and I have a vested personal interest - if merely intellectual - since a few years ago I wanted to add induction to the Quest but abandoned it for some of the reasoning I stated above and also I think the drum is stainless).

But they did put the design on paper and are trying to sell it - so they are asking for "questions". And if the engineering "job" doesn't solve the engineering "problem" - we all lose. So it should not be surprising that having all "engineering" concerns addressed in a marketing white paper or a user manual does help convince buyers (at least ones like me) that they have crossed the t's and dotted their i's (sorta like the KickStarter model of selling future products).

Currently, I am hopeful that all of these are moot engineering "job" concerns solved long ago by the developers - but perhaps they do need the help and guidance of people who have done this before.

Hey guys, I can't believe I just heard about this roaster mid-SCAA weekend. My wife and I have been thinking about moving up from our Sonofresco to something bigger, but have also wanted to be able to do samples...so I eagerly bit the bullet (wow, I almost missed that unintentional pun) on the $1500 pre-order. Did anyone else?

I'm even considering getting two at that price, and trying to get some friends in Portland to also order for a shipping break (will probably be $200ish, unless a group of them can ship to one city). I really enjoyed talking to the designers, hearing all the answers of what the roaster an would do and measure, the ease of sharing/collaborating profiles among the roasters (and hopefully green bean suppliers), it sounded just like what we were looking for.

I'm excited for some others to get into this and share some profiles!

yes, we preordered two of them and already paid, but honestly we don't know much about it.
Jonas replied email carefully when asking about technical issues, maybe because they are applying patent for it.