Wow, the Gene Cafe roaster booth is busy! This is the third time I've gone by, but each time, the booth reps were busy with potential customers. All I could do is hover, watch, and snap a few photos.

I wanted to ask some questions about the products. I think the Gene Cafe Roaster is simply amazing in 90% of its aspects. It's quiet. It has that very cool, very effective oscillating counter-balancing rotation to mix and agitate the beans while roasting. It has very accurate temperature controls and readings. It does a great job collecting chaff (well, most of the time - I've thrown a few greens its way that clogged up the exhaust grill on the roaster chamber). It does an exceptionally even roast. It's very hands on, and very tyro-friendly with the instant adjustments you can do to temperatures and roasting time.

The 10%? The Gene Cafe, like pretty much every air roaster on the market, and other roasters like the Alpenrost, sucks at cooling down the beans. 10 minutes to go from 455F to 120F is not a good thing. I was hoping to talk to Frank Ahn or another rep in the booth about this, and ways that the machine could be modified to make the cooling better, but I didn't get the chance.

By the way, this is no slight against Genesis here - it was my own bad that I didn't just wait until they had a free moment. They are there at the show to talk to vendors, and I didn't want to interrupt. It was a common thing at this year's show... I'm betting the attendance numbers for the SCAA show are up this year.

And I am sure if I introduced myself and asked for some time, they would have given it to me. I could see it was a popular and friendly booth!

Well enough of that. How about some photos from the booth, including a totally rad transparent version of the Gene Cafe!

Gene Cafe Digital Sorry for the bad colour balance. This is a very cool, smokey red colour Gene Cafe with the new digital panel. Someone asked why digital, since the original Gene has great analog controls. In a word: profiles. Big Exhaust Here's the original Gene with the new supersized chaff collector. It collects more chaff, but also has a filtration system to reduce smoke output. Best part? You can put a heatsafe-tube (go to Home Depot) on it to vent outdoors. Transparent Gene! Woah. Tres cool. A pretty-much working Gene model that's all transparent. See the black fan box on the left? That's the air feed to the roaster. The metal part is the heating element enclosure. Somehow, Genesis has to design a second airflow for cooling away from this hot stuff, to get better cooling.