Roasting on the Nano

Everything so far has been roaster-agnostic on purpose — it holds on a drum, an air roaster, a popper. Now we map it onto your machine. The Kaffelogic Nano does two things that make it special: it roasts almost purely with hot air, and it roasts from an automated profile rather than your hands on the controls.

How the Nano works

The Nano is a fluid-bed convection roaster. A blower pushes air across a heating element and up through a roast chamber. That rising hot air does two jobs at once: it heats the beans, and it lifts and tumbles them into a churning vortex — "fluidizing" the bed so every bean bathes evenly in the same hot stream. A temperature probe in the chamber feeds the controller, which trims the element to hit your target. A batch is about 100 g, roasting in ~10 minutes with a ~4-minute cooldown after.

What that changes versus a drum

• Almost pure convection. No hot drum wall to scorch against, so the cup is exceptionally clean and even — and there's little risk of the conduction faults (scorching, tipping) that haunt drum roasting.
• Low thermal mass, fast response. With no heavy steel drum storing heat, the Nano reacts quickly — but it also has less momentum to coast on, so it's a touch less forgiving of a bad profile.
• Airflow does double duty. Air is both your heat and your agitation, so they're coupled in a way they aren't on a drum. The Nano manages this for you by modulating the element and fan together.

The big shift: you design a profile, the machine roasts it

On a drum you ride the heat by hand, minute to minute. The Nano flips that. You hand it a profile — a planned temperature curve over time, plus airspeed and a few parameters — and its controller executes it, using a PID loop with a "look-ahead" that anticipates the curve instead of chasing it. Press start and walk away.

So your craft moves upstream: from real-time knob-wrangling to profile design and iteration. The payoff is the Nano's superpower — repeatability. The same profile and the same green coffee give you a near-identical roast every time, which makes deliberate, one-variable-at-a-time learning actually possible.

Kaffelogic Studio

The desktop software is where the design happens. With it you can:

• Draw and edit profile curves directly — shape the rate of rise you learned to want in Chapter 6.
• Watch the roast live — bean temperature and a calculated RoR, in real time.
• Save and overlay logs so you can compare today's roast against last week's, milestone for milestone.
• Mark milestones — color change, first crack, second crack — and use the temperature envelope feature to translate or compare profiles across machines.
• Start from a built-in. The Nano ships with a set of ready profiles; pick one matched to your bean and tweak from there rather than starting on a blank canvas.

The Nano reads its own numbers

One thing that trips up newcomers who've read drum-roaster advice: the Nano's temperatures are on the Nano's own scale. Its probe sits in the moving air around the beans, not buried in a packed bean mass, so it reads higher than the "true bean surface" temperatures this guide has used. First crack, which is ~196°C on the true scale, typically shows somewhere around 212–226°C on a Nano.

Mapping the guide onto your machine

A simple first-week workflow

1. Start from a built-in profile that matches your bean (density, process, target level).
2. Weigh in ~100 g and run it. Resist the urge to change anything the first time.
3. Listen for first crack and note its time, plus the color and total time at the drop.
4. Rest the beans 12–24 hours, then brew and taste. Write down what you notice.
5. Change exactly one thing next time — a little more development, a slightly gentler ramp — and compare. One variable at a time is how you actually learn.

Enough theory and knobs — let's put all of it in motion. Next, a roast simulator you can actually drive, with a Nano preset waiting for you.