I took at 10 year hiatus from roasting. Randomly got the itch again got on sweet marias a few weeks ago and got pretty nostalgic when I saw the Popper!

Has anyone been using this? Need to some tips to before I get too frustrated. If I keep my DE at 4 min I tend to roast too light. I take another approach and I find weight lost shows 15% but the outside of the bean is roasty and translate to the cup.

Any advice is appreciated, kind of regretting getting rid of my old trust popper.

I had pretty good luck with mine, but IMO the Popper benefits from installing a thermometer. There are a few ways of doing this: 1) You can follow the SM video instructions for drilling into the chamber to install a thermocouple; or, 2) You can insert a long analogi or digital thermometer through the cover and set it to end in the swirling bean mass. With whatever method you use, it's critical to get the tip of the thermometer within the bean mass.

I tried both and found the SM instructions easy to follow and they sell a thermocouple that fits. Both methods work fine, but given the excellent SM instructions I'd recommend their approach.

Awesome thank you! I just found the SM blog for this.

Do you follow a the 50/30/20 % rule with your popper? Or have you found something else works better. I am curious since the Popper is different than the standard drums.

IntrepidQ3 wrote:Awesome thank you! I just found the SM blog for this.

Do you follow a the 50/30/20 % rule with your popper? Or have you found something else works better. I am curious since the Popper is different than the standard drums.

I've heard of the 50/30/20% rule for income budgeting, but not for coffee roasting.

50% of roast time in dry phase, 30% in browning, 20% in development

When using my hot air roasters (e.g. SM's Popper and iRoast 2), I didn't bother determining when dry-end occurred, as this is not so easy as it is for drum roasters with a bean sample scoop. Nor did I think it was nearly as important as noting when FC starts and how much time is spent going from FC to SC, and making sure the roast doesn't stall in the process. Another thing to note is that the SM Popper is not designed to get into SC. You can do it, but it will stress the machine. Total roast times for this type of machine are usually around 9 to 11 minutes, and I like to see if I can get the roast to spend at least 20% in development after the start of FC.

Good to know, thank you for the insight. Do you have a rough time you try to reach FC?

As you know, the Popper, unlike popcorn poppers, allows temp and fan speed control. This feature lets you roast for longer times than the 5 or so minutes you get with popcorn machines, so you're able to create a customized roast profile. The Popper timer counts down from 10 minutes, heating for 7 and then switches to cooling for the remaining 3 minutes, BUT you can easily add more heating time by rotating the timer dial.

All this is to answer your question about FC timing...you can ramp up to FC as fast as you want with full heat and get through a roast in 5 or 7 minutes. I generally tried getting a roast to run a few minutes longer and letting FC go on for about 20% of the total (heated) roast time.

To get you started, here's a typical roast on the Popper for me. This is more omni focused for drip and espresso and roasted to City+. You can see that I managed the roast through temperature adjustments and stayed between 3-3.75 power (note that SM's suggested dial looks like a clock where mine starts at 0 [easier to graph], so 3 is at 12 noon). The power seems to step up between 3.25 and 3.3 for me, so you can see that I'm micro adjusting between those setting to stretch out Maillard.

Don't worry about the "crash", any temperature readings are strongly ET readings so variations in power will swing temps much more.

As the other folks said earlier, the 50/30/20 phase ratios is more suited for drum roasters, where DE is prolonged to prevent scorching. I pushed more of that time into Maillard to gain sweetness.

I'm mostly roasting on the SR800/Artisan lately, but will use the Popper to cup and compare roast levels. It's also helpful to finish up those pesky ends of bags of ~100g!

I've looked at the SM Popper many times when tempted to put my toe into the home roasting waters. It's inexpensive and appears like it should work reasonably well. Adding a thermocouple would be easy enough. Looks like they are about to release an updated version of it in the next month or so.

But I've always thought I'd have to roast every other day. Is that what you guys do? Or maybe even every day? Or do you roast back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back batches all in one day to get a larger amount?