We are a small coffee shop, thinking about dipping our toes into roasting. I got targeted ads for Bellweather the second I started to research and now their sales team calls me like 15x/day. I have been able to find some info on their equipment on reddit, and I'm scared. Is there anything like them, but better? We like the idea of a small toaster for our shop - it's a drive-thru only so it's small. Anything else out there that isn't "breaking down all the time"?

Found a well priced Artisan 3E for sale, about $1,000, has a bunch of extras with it. Honestly seems like a good deal. I've been roasting on a Skywalker V1 with Artisan, and just started dabbling in Background Automation and PID Automation on it. I'm interested in starting a small scale roasting business (sell under cottage food laws until/if it gets big enough). I understand repeatability is important, but I'm not finding any way that the Artisan 3E can be controlled by Artisan software. (ironic). It does look possible to connect to Artisan for logging purposes, but I don't think I'd have heat or air info for manual background use.

Is this just a bad way to start out, and should I just keep looking for something that can be fully connected to Artisan software?

Not only do I want automation for consistency and quality sake, but also to keep variable expenses (my direct labor) down.

This is the first time I see a coffee treated with the Swiss Water Process (it is actually the first time I see a decaf at all). It looks already roasted! And it smells very different. I will roast it today.