Fresh Roast SR900

The Fresh Roast SR900 is the latest fluid bed air roaster from Home Roasting Supplies. It takes what we love about the SR540 and SR800 units and incorporates new features like a revised roasting chamber, integrated bean temperature probe and Bluetooth app connectivity. The latter feature, wireless connectivity to the Roast-Tech app, is one of the more significant updates, underpinning the other changes and deserving greater focus.

The Roast-Tech app is the predominant way to interact with the roaster. Although you can still control the roaster via its revised physical controls, we feel that the best way to make adjustments to fan speed and heat settings is through the app's digital interface. The app also displays bean temperature and rate of rise data, courtesy of the new bean temperature probe, so it’s easier to see the impact of fan and heat adjustments in real time. You can also pre-program adjustments to heat and fan settings using time-based roast profiles, which we found really useful for repeating roasts. Even though the capacity (225 g or 8 oz) is the same as the SR800, it felt like less effort to roast several batches of coffee on the SR900, thanks to this feature.

The new physical controls ditch the knob of the SR540 and SR800 for buttons and a screen that cycles through settings. Although this new setup might be more durable and robust than the knob, we found it really difficult to use. So much so that we feel the app is a necessity for controlling the SR900. If you prefer physical controls or just plain don't want to use an app to control your roaster, the SR800 remains a great choice that is easy to recommend.

In most other ways, the SR900 is very similar to the closely related SR800. We found the roast quality to be the same; they use the same chaff basket and top cap, and the 9 heat levels and 9 fans speeds offer similar, and excellent, control over roasts. Which one is best for you will largely come down to your preferred level of physical interaction with roasting. Do you like to push in the clutch and row through the gears yourself, or is the ease of an automatic more your speed?