LITHON Home Roaster RT-01
Roasting your own coffee at home may seem like a high hurdle, but there are actually machines out there that let you do it easily for around 20,000 yen.
The one I want to introduce here is the LITHON Home Roaster RT-01.
It is one of the best-known home roasters for getting serious coffee roasting done with minimal effort.
I had the chance to buy one and have been using it for a while, so here are my impressions.
The good
Green beans are cheap
You get to drink freshly roasted coffee
You can roast small batches, so you never struggle to use it up
Buying coffee as green beans costs about a quarter of what roasted beans cost.
Also, while roasted beans are said to stay good for one to two months, green beans keep for about two years.
In other words, once you find a bean you like, buying it green lets you drink it cheaply and at its most delicious, right after roasting.
Coffee beans are said to taste best about three days to two weeks after roasting.
At a coffee shop, beans are usually sold in 100 g units and at least a day or two has already passed since roasting (much longer at chain stores), so if you want to drink the coffee at its best, you have to get through that 100 g pretty quickly.
100 g is roughly ten cups, which is quite a lot for one person even drinking every day.
This roaster handles 40–60 g of beans at a time, so you can drink coffee in its best condition while only roasting as much as you can comfortably finish.
Roasting is quite a chore to do by hand, but here you can just leave it running, which is why I personally like it a lot.
The bad
It’s fairly noisy
The roasting smell is strong
You can’t fine-tune the roast level
The first thing that surprises you is how loud it is while running.
Loud enough that watching YouTube next to it while it works would be a bit rough.
The noise doesn’t really carry through walls, so it’s not unusable in an apartment, but it is loud enough that it’ll surprise you at first.
As for the roasting smell, I imagine this is true of any machine, but roasting really does fill the room with a coffee-shop aroma.
It’s strong enough that you should ventilate while roasting, and even then the smell lingers for a day.
Since it’s the smell of coffee, it’s not at all unpleasant for coffee lovers and works almost like an air freshener, but you might want to avoid roasting on days when guests are coming over.
On not being able to fine-tune the roast level:
There are two modes, Medium and Dark.
Medium comes out around a medium roast, and Dark around a dark roast.
(In the photos, Medium is on top and Dark on the bottom.)
To be more precise, Medium is about a medium roast, and Dark is around a city or French roast.
The medium-dark roast level that probably suits the most people isn’t achievable on this machine, so if that’s the coffee you want, you may need to get creative.
Overall
Roasting your own coffee beans is something most coffee lovers want to try at least once.
Downsides aside, I’ve been enjoying mine quite a bit.
The fun of choosing green beans, being able to watch the roast unfold up close — it really broadens what you can enjoy about coffee.
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but for anyone who wants to start roasting coffee or is simply curious, it’s an easy and relatively affordable way in, so I’d recommend it to them.