LITHON Home Roaster RT-01
Roasting your own coffee is often thought to be a fairly high hurdle, but in fact there are machines out there that let you do it easily for around 20,000 yen.
What I want to introduce here is the LITHON Home Roaster RT-01.
It’s one of the best-known home roasters for doing proper coffee roasting with minimal fuss.
I had the chance to buy one, and after using it for a while, I’d like to share my impressions.
What I like
Green beans are cheap
You get to drink freshly roasted coffee
You can roast small amounts, so you never struggle to use it up
Buying coffee as green beans costs about a quarter of what you’d pay for roasted beans.
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 get it cheaply and drink it at its best—right after roasting.
Coffee beans are said to taste best from three days to about two weeks after roasting.
When you buy beans at a coffee shop, they’re usually sold in 100 g units and at least a day or two has already passed since roasting (much longer at coffee chains), 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 coffee at a time, so you can drink beans in their best condition in amounts you can comfortably finish.
Roasting is quite a chore to do by hand, but here you just leave it running—which is why I personally like it so much.
What I don’t like
It’s fairly noisy
The roasting smell is quite strong
You can’t fine-tune the roast level
The first thing that surprises you is how loud it is in operation.
It’s loud enough that watching YouTube next to it while it runs is a bit rough.
It’s not a booming kind of noise, so it’s not unusable in an apartment, but it does make a fair amount of sound and will probably startle you at first.
As for the roasting smell, this is probably true of any machine: roasting fills the room with a real coffee-shop aroma.
It’s strong enough that you should ventilate while roasting, and even then the smell lingers for a day.
It’s a coffee smell, so for coffee lovers it isn’t unpleasant at all—more like a room fragrance—but you might want to avoid roasting when you have guests coming over.
On not being able to fine-tune the roast level
There are two modes: Medium and Dark.
Medium gives roughly a medium roast, and Dark roughly a dark roast.
(In the photos, Medium is on top and Dark below.)
To be more precise, Medium is about a medium roast and Dark is about a city or French roast.
The machine can’t produce a medium-dark roast, which is probably the level most people prefer, so if that’s the coffee you want, you may need to get a little creative.
Overall
Roasting your own coffee beans is surely something every coffee lover wants to try at least once.
Downsides aside, I’ve come to like this machine quite a lot and use it regularly.
The fun of choosing green beans, being able to watch the roast unfold—it really broadens how you enjoy coffee.
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but if you’re curious about roasting your own coffee and want to give it a try, it’s an easy and relatively affordable way to start—so for those people, I’d recommend it.
