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When it comes to coffee, there are varying levels of dedication to your brew. From the pre-ground stuff from the store in your drip maker all the way up to roasting and grinding your own to brew in a complex feed, everyone justifies where they’re at. Me, I’m happy with my burr grinder and Aeropress, but every now and again I wonder about roasting my own beans. While I’d probably start with an electric popcorn maker, there’s a new over-the-top option: the Sandbox Smart R2 Coffee Roaster.
The Sandbox Smart R2 Coffee Roaster looks to be about the size of a convection toaster oven, and aims to make your at-home roasting process a good bit simpler. Ok, not as simple as the popcorn popper, but it gives you a lot of fine-grained control over the process, and even has some add-ons for helping keep the smoke down from the roasting process.
The Sandbox Smart R2 Coffee Roaster also has a membership model, which looks like a way of sharing roasting recipes / configs. Perhaps there’s a value-add there, but I’m leery of any appliance that comes with a subscription component. Why? Well, we’ve seen brands behaving badly in the past that caused perfectly fine devices to just stop working when the subscription stops (or the brand decides the device is too old).
For the price of $2,130 you do get 6-months of VIP access, so I suppose there’s that? While this doesn’t seem exorbitant as compared to other roasting systems, it is still a good deal of cash to put down on something that you can do with a $30 appliance you may already have in your cupboard, or even do on your stovetop with your current hardware. Still, if you pick one up, I’ll be more than happy to try a cup that’s brewed from it’s output. The campaign is running until March 2, 2022, and is currently fully funded. sandboxsmart.com / kickstarter.com
