I had good feedback from Buckeye when I needed it. Same day, sometimes within the hour.

Buckey is supporting the Artisan project financially on a monthly basis. MCR has never supported Artisan in any way.

Do you live in an apartment, or do you live in a house with space to safely roast with flammable gasses? If you're in an apartment you would have to come up with a really good reason to not go electric.

Do you roast for others? How much coffee do you go through a week? I love my Bullet but when dialing in coffee I wish I had a smaller roaster. If I didn't roast for friends and family (and occasionally coworkers with group buys) I'd probably have gone with a Quest M3. There's no real perfect answer with a hobbyist batch size... if you go smaller you'll eventually wish you'd gone bigger in certain scenarios, if you go bigger you'll eventually wish you'd gone smaller in others. Although with your budget you could get both the Bullet and the Quest, or maybe the Ikawa for sample roasting and profile development.

There's no real scenario where the Arc outperforms the bullet, and is 50% more expensive. Nobody every got fired for buying Mill City, but as you're well aware, it costs the big bucks.

Some additional considerations for you based on my "roasting addiction" journey:

1) Having gone from electric to gas roasters, I will never go back to electric. I love the control of gas and easy ability to do back-to-back roasts. And gas heat is simple; if something breaks parts/stoves are readily available. And I no longer worry about electric power drops affecting my roasts.

2) As a hobbyist, do you REALLY need 1lb batch capacity? It takes more time to setup/warmup my roaster than anything else, so banging out multiple batches after that is not much additional work. And a smaller roaster may be more portable and less expensive.

3) Whatever roaster you choose, consider maintenance and spare parts in case the company goes under. I bought spare parts with my Huky and then later found I could source parts for it anywhere. It's also simple and built like a tank so I can keep it running till I die.

4) Buy a roaster that is more "open source" versus proprietary. That way you can upgrade/modify/fix it as needed. Over the years I've added air sensors, RTD probes, automated fan control, and more using Artisan software to control it all. All those things are available off the shelf. My only dependency 'risk' is Artisan and it's open source!

If I were in your shoes today, I'd seriously consider the Cormorant and apply the above criteria as I investigated it. And if you are willing to tinker, the Huky is still not a bad choice either.

To answer a few of the questions above:

I live in a house, rather than an apartment, so no concerns there. I'll have dedicated space in my garage, so the roaster will never move, unless I change houses.

As for whether or not I need to roast a full pound...I guess, technically, no, but my wife and I go through about a pound per week, so that's typically what I do now. Historically, I haven't done more than that, simply because I wouldn't want the coffee to stale. We drink primarily espresso, so I like to have it as fresh as possible.

If you're only going through a pound a week and have no plans to 'go commercial', you may be looking at too much roaster. There are plenty of roasters that can do half-pound batches for much less money than those you're considering. For example, I roast every week to ten days and to about two pounds in my Quest M3 MK-II (for the same freshness reason that you cite). I usually do four back-to-back batches. This may sound like more work, but actually it is necessary if you like to mess with blends, as I do. My favourite blend has three component coffees. Each needs a different roast level to bring out the needed characteristics. So I do two batches of one and one each of the two others. If I do single-origin roasts, I still stick to half-pound batches, as I'm so in tune with the roaster after doing many hundreds of batches, that I no longer use software, just a couple of digital thermometers.

I was on a similar quest as you a while back. I chose the Aillio.

Coming from a Behmor, I was looking for something that was easy to just start a roast on a whim. I wanted the work done for me in terms of interfacing with a computer, and I wanted good support. I was also hedging towards electric over gas just because it felt "easier".

Support from Sweet Maria's has been fantastic. They really do a great job supporting this roaster and so I feel like if Aillio magically vanished tomorrow support would be good for a while. They do care. That said, I don't see Aillio going out of business anytime soon - they sell quickly, and they have a good design. They could get bought I suppose and that could change things. They don't really have any competitors in this space besides Behmor if Behmor ever releases their large roaster (what's the story on that one anyhow?).

I looked at Cormorant and actually had my name on the list to get one. Seems like a reasonable solution in a small gas roaster.

I roast maybe 1kg per week max, sometimes a little more if I'm doing beans for a friend/family. I don't sell my beans, just personal consumption.

Roasting on an Aillio I think is a bit different than a traditional gas roaster as others have said. Not that its necessarily better or worse, just different. This may or may not take getting used to, depending on where you're coming from.

JScottTuck wrote: As for whether or not I need to roast a full pound...I guess, technically, no, but my wife and I go through about a pound per week, so that's typically what I do now. Historically, I haven't done more than that, simply because I wouldn't want the coffee to stale. We drink primarily espresso, so I like to have it as fresh as possible.

It's nice to be able to roast at least a lb of greens at a time. Although it is called the CR600 for 600 grams the current version of the Cormorant can roast anywhere from 300gr to 700 gr loads. Under 300 gr you'd have to play with the BT probe to keep it in the bean load. Johan keeps making improvements with the latest version offering variable drum speed & the ideal drum ET probe location. Runs between $2000-$2100 delivered in the U.S.

The only downside to the Cormorant is the wait time. The MCR 500g is a great roaster, but you can buy over 2 Cormorants for the price of one MCR. I would snap one up before Johan comes to his senses.

My take on this. If I only wanted to roast once a week, a pound at a time I just might buy roasted coffee, or a roaster that does all the work for me, with profiles built in to the roaster. Why? I'm a rookie with 650 roasts under my belt and still make mistakes. Roastings not as easy as it looks, pretty profiles and all. If I had a place for my roasted coffee to go without giving it all away I would roast everyday. I started out this way, spending lot's of $$ with no less than 100 lbs of beans on hand all the time. People like free stuff and when asked to buck up, nothing. I still give away some to 'select' people.

Practice makes perfect.