I Repaired My Gene Café CBR 301 And Now Everything Is Different

My Gene Café CBR-301 had a heater failure, I repaired it myself, and now the machine is back — but it is not behaving like the same roaster I had before. This video is not the full repair guide. That video is coming next. This is the bigger story behind the repair: what happens when a home coffee roaster is working again, but the roast behaviour has clearly changed. After six post-repair calibration roasts — three cold starts and three warm starts — it is already clear that the repaired Gene Café CBR-301 needs to be understood again before I trust the old roast logic. In this video, I talk through what changed after the heater replacement, why I am treating this as a recalibration phase, and what the data is already showing in terms of roast timing, fan behaviour, warm vs cold starts, TRT, weight loss, and roast checkpoints like 200°C, 230°C, and 245°C. The key point is simple: repaired does not automatically mean unchanged. For this project, that matters a lot. The whole approach behind Coffee | One Roast at a Time is built around observation, repeatability, and learning how the machine actually behaves over time. So when the machine changes, the process has to slow down and the trust has to be rebuilt properly. In this video I cover: Gene Café CBR-301 heater failure, DIY heater replacement, first impressions after repair, six calibration roasts, roast behaviour changes, fan step timing, cold start vs warm start differences, TRT and weight loss, and why a new baseline now needs to be built. The repair itself turned out to be much easier than I expected. But the more interesting part is what happened after the repair — because that is where the machine started telling a different story. If you are interested in Gene Café CBR-301 roasting, home coffee roasting, coffee roaster repair, roast analysis, and practical, experience-led learning, subscribe. The repair video and the next calibration roasts are coming next. #GeneCafe #CBR301 #CoffeeRoasting Chapters 00:00 Intro and welcome 00:00:52 Another reflection video 00:01:07 Why the machine staying the same mattered 00:02:01 The heater failed 00:02:13 Repairing the Gene Café CBR-301 myself 00:02:52 This video is about what happened after the repair 00:03:17 Six calibration roasts later 00:04:04 The replacement heater, 220V vs 230V 00:05:03 Observation vs assumption 00:05:23 The repaired machine has a different fingerprint 00:05:48 Fan behaviour changed after repair 00:06:50 Why TRT no longer means the same thing 00:07:43 Relearning the machine 00:08:50 Building a new baseline 00:09:45 What comes next