Regular Maintenance: Cleaning the Bullet R1 Roaster

Back when I did most of my coffee roasting primarily on a Behmor 1600+, I regularly had to perform a cleaning routine that usually involved scrubbing some of the inside parts of the roaster with Simple Green and then running the roaster empty on a short cycle.1 Since I started roasting on the Bullet R1, I have only attempted a brief cleaning routine once, and after just a month of roasting, it’s time to do the clean again.

According to the software that integrates with my Bullet R1, I’ve roasted a tad more than 10kg of coffee in the last month, and that means it’s time for a clean. Aillio recommends cleaning the infrared (IR) sensor on the inside of the roaster face-plate after every 10kg of roasting, so I figured today would be as good a time as any. I grabbed my tools and an old rag, prepared a solution of Cafiza — a cleaner usually used for espresso machines2, and dug in.

Quick Disassembly

The roasting faceplate is held on with a number of screws which are easy to take off, but the faceplate is heavy and it’s attached to a bundle of wires for the electronics, so you can’t just let it hang off to the side. I have a cardboard box that is about the right height for resting the face plate while cleaning, and that seems to work fine. Below is a photo of the inside of the roaster with the faceplate pulled back:

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Roaster with face-plate off

After 10kg of coffee, the inside of the faceplate isn’t too bad. There was a bunch of chaff dust that had stuck to coffee oils and was building up on the metal itself, but I found that cleaning took 1-2 minutes at the most. I gave everything a good scrub, focused on the IR sensor for most of my scrubbing and then dried everything off. While I had the faceplate off, I vacuumed out any chaff that might have found its way underneath the drum and cleaned the glass window to provide a good view of the beans.

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Inside of the faceplate, with both sensor shown

Cleaning the Chaff Filter

After reassembling the front of the roaster successfully, I cleaned out the chaff collector and soaked the chaff filter, which looks like a small mesh cup, in a Cafiza solution. It’s amazing how much gunk came out of that thing - I’m guessing I’ll need to clean it more frequently than the IR sensor. After everything was dry, I put it all back together and did a roast of a Mexican coffee I got last month from La Bodega. It’s all working great, and the coffee turned out really nice.

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The chaff filter soaking in Cafiza

Of course, the tricky thing now is to remember when to do the next cleaning. Just so I could remember, I logged today’s cleaning in my Day One journal, and I’ll be able to go back and look for the date when I last did it so I can calculate how much coffee I’ve roasted. All told, this was a fairly painless exercise, so I’m pretty confident that this maintenance task will become boring and routine in the future.


  1. I presume this empty cycle was to burn out any leftover chaff and stuff. The roaster did always seem cleaner when I did that. ↩︎

  2. Cafiza is really quite good at eating away coffee oils, so I use it for almost everything. Warning: it does seem to permanently discolor aluminum, so don’t use it on your moka pot if you want to keep that thing shiny. ↩︎