Feel free to update us on your progress if you participated in that thread.
While I don't make zines to make money, per se (going as far to give a free digital copy on my site), there's still evidentially enough people that buy them that it technically counts.
Interestingly by that point there were much better, cheaper alternatives and the friction of switching was low, but I had a hard time convincing people to stop using it.
Would you share some more details about all this, your setup and how you do it? I'm expecting you to do this in a much lower scale than "regular" coffee roasters, and I'm sure more people might be interested in this.
I roast about 4oz at a time but you can get an extension or get the larger FR to roast about a lb. For context, bag are usually 8, 10 or 12oz.
Smoke is mininal with the FR but I'm def getting irritated. I live an apartment so it's been a little tricky with venting.
You control two variable, fan speed and temp. With those, you control the temperature curve and it takes about 15 mins each bag from prep to cool down.
We sell for $10 a bag but half goes to green beans and packing and we donate $5.
Def learning a lot about scale. The typical commercial roaster is 10-15kg. Yep... Those cost about 15k.
Next would probably be improving our packaging to make it more attractive.
Lots of content on youtube and podcasts. Hit me up if you have more q's!
