A total of 2 reviews of this product on Reddit.
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https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S9XYC48/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
This is the one I’m using. There are several other options available as well. I know there’s one with the vent holes in the black portion cut to resemble coffee beans and leaves as well.
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I have the Gene Cafe – I love it. When I was deciding what machine to get the Behmor was also on my radar. I tend to roast FC to FC+ for pour over and darker for Espresso.
There were several reasons I went with the Gene Cafe.
1) The Gene Cafe can be directly vented. I roast indoors in a high rise building and I simply would rather vent the smoke out a window rather than “suppress” it.
2) Due to the design of the Behmor the chaff collection tray is significantly closer to the heating element meaning it does indeed have a higher chance of catching fire when doing darker roasts.
3) I have better visibility of the coffee during the process in the Gene Cafe than the Behmor would.
A few things I DONT like about the Gene Cafe
1) Small batch size, you’re really limited to 200g of green coffee
2) Pre-heating, while it does work is less effective than with other machines due to the fact that the roasting drum has a fairly low thermal mass to hold heat.
3) The built-in cool down cycle is useless for cooling coffee – its far too slow. I always use the E-stop function at the end of my roasts. I do however place the roasting drum back on the unit and start a new “cooldown” cycle with the drum empty to ensure that the element and other components cool correctly.
On the topic of cooling your coffee. I highly suggest getting a cooling tray setup to more rapidly cool the coffee. This one inst cheap but its amazingly effective https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S9XYC48.
That all being said you cant go wrong with both machines.
