Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been home roasting coffee for more than 30 years. If you have a well-ventilated kitchen, it's possible to do perfectly good roasts in the oven with a metal vegetable steamer. But it gets extremely smokey. My first coffee roasting machine about 25 years ago was an early air roaster similar to the Fresh Roast, but it was less than satisfactory. So I purchased the Gene Cafe drum roaster, which does nice even roasts, whether light, medium or dark. But the heating element wore out every 3 or 4 years. Finally, after about 15 years with the Gene Cafe, I lost patience with it having to constantly replace the heating element, and decided to try an air roaster again. The Fresh Roast 540 seemed to get the best reviews online, so I decided to try it. It works much better than I expected, but there are a few issues. First, the claim that it has 9 roast setting is misleading. There are 3 controls: fan speed; heat level; and time. Each can be set anywhere from 1-9. However, any fan setting less than 6 is not enough to move the beans. Any heat setting less than 8 will not be enough to actually roast the beans. A time setting of 9 minutes at the highest heat setting will get you a medium roast (varying the fan setting between 8 & 9). I was able to get a very nice medium dark roast by periodically adjusting the fan setting between 8 & 9, and adding several minutes to the initial setting of 9. This meant carefully watching the beans and adding time until they reached the roast I was looking for. So this takes a lot of experimentation until you get the roast you want. The most serious flaw is the chaff collector. It doesn't collect nearly all of the chaff, so that you will need to put the roasted beans in a colander, take it outside and use a fan, or a good breeze to blow off the rest of the chaff. If you leave the chaff, it will affect the taste of your coffee. I do know some people who don't mind that taste, but I'm not one of them. Bottom line for me is that unless you want to pay $600 or more for something like Gene Cafe, this is a good roaster for the price.