Using the LINK as a Home Roaster

The LINK was designed as a sample roaster for professionals — but some of its most passionate users have never set foot in a commercial roastery.

Home roasters around the world have adopted the LINK as their machine of choice, drawn to the same qualities that make it valuable in a professional setting: algorithmic precision, a deep and constantly expanding profile library, and a system that takes the guesswork out of roasting without taking the enjoyment out of it. This is what using the LINK at home actually looks like.

Designed for consistency, not just capacity

Most home roasters ask you to develop an intuition — to learn through trial and error, to adjust by feel, and to accept a degree of unpredictability as part of the process. The LINK takes a fundamentally different approach.

Rather than leaving roasting decisions to guesswork, the LINK’s algorithmic system uses your coffee’s density, process type, and origin to calculate a recommended roast plan and power curve before the roast begins. Every variable that would otherwise require years of experience to navigate is handled by the system, leaving you free to focus on the coffee itself. The result is a level of consistency that most home roasters never achieve — not because they lack skill, but because they lack the right tool.

One of the most common concerns home roasters have when investing in a serious piece of equipment is whether they will grow into it or out of it. With the LINK, the answer is neither — because the system is designed to meet you exactly where you are and expand as your knowledge does. On day one, you can follow the LINK App’s recommendations from start to finish and produce an excellent roast without understanding a single thing about power curves or DTR targets.

As your experience develops, the same system opens up: manual profile selection, Fan Priority control, power curve adjustments, Advanced Dial-In, and a library of more than 6000 profiles covering every roast style, origin, and variety you are likely to encounter.

You can also design, edit and share your own profiles – meaning that the capabilities for home roasters are limitless.

The LINK does not have a ceiling. The more you put into it, the more it gives back

The community asked, we listened: Bold Profiles

One of the clearest examples of how home roasters have shaped the LINK system is the Bold profile packs, introduced in our Addis 4.2 firmware update in July 2026.

The demand for Bold profiles did not come from commercial roasteries or competition circuits — it came from home roasters. People who love darker coffee, who were using the LINK every day to roast for themselves and their households, and who wanted the same algorithmic precision and control applied to a more developed roast. They asked for it, repeatedly and clearly, and we built it.

Bold profiles are available across Cupping, Filter, Espresso, and Omni, and they are not simply longer or hotter versions of existing plans. They are specifically engineered to deliver the best possible cup at a noticeably darker roast degree, driven by a significantly larger post-crack temperature increase than standard profiles — ranging from 11°C to 18°C, compared to roughly 4–7°C in most standard plans.

The same precision that defines every other profile in the LINK system applies here too. Bold profiles are best suited to denser, sturdier coffees, and they reward the same attention to green bean selection that makes any roast on the LINK shine. They exist because home roasters asked for them — and that is exactly the kind of community-driven development that will continue to shape the LINK system going forward.

Fan Priority: Express yourself with airflow

Addis 4.2 also introduces Fan Priority — a feature that gives home roasters a level of creative control that would previously have required deep technical knowledge to access.

Fan Priority introduces airflow as a third layer of control in the LINK roasting system, allowing you to bias your roast toward acidity and clarity, balance and harmony, or depth and sweetness, without touching the underlying roast plan. You don’t need to understand airflow theory to use it. Before your roast begins, you simply select the expression you want to bring out from your coffee, and the system applies the corresponding airflow curve automatically.

For a home roaster experimenting across different coffees and brew methods, Fan Priority opens up a genuinely new dimension of exploration — the ability to taste the same coffee in multiple directions, and to develop a real understanding of how airflow shapes the cup.

World-class profiles in your home

With our latest update, Addis 4.2, home roasters also gain access to something that would have been unthinkable not long ago: the exact profiles used to win a world championship.

The LINK’s connection to world-class competition is not a recent development — it is a track record that has been building since 2021. Matt Winton’s World Brewers Cup win that year was one of the earliest signals that the LINK was not just a sample roaster, but a serious competition tool.

In 2024, Martin Wölfl took the title in Chicago, again roasting on the LINK — a win that led directly to the WBrC 2024 profile pack, which replicates the filter profiles Jerome Rosler built around Martin’s coffee and is already available to every LINK user.

Then in 2026, Nas Jaafar became the first Malaysian to win the World Brewers Cup in Brussels, roasting on the LINK for the third time in five years that the machine has been in the hands of a world champion.

Three World Brewers Cup wins. Three roasters. One machine.

With Addis 4.2, home roasters gain access to the WBrC 2026 profile pack — the exact profiles used by Nas Jaafar on the competition stage — alongside the already-available WBrC 2024 pack from Martin Wölfl’s winning roast. The competition-style Espresso G and H profiles, developed by certified WBC judge Angus Mackie, bring the same competition-quality thinking to everyday espresso roasting.

These are not approximations or inspirations — they are the real thing, available to anyone with a LINK roaster. The gap between home roasting and world-class roasting has never been smaller.

The LINK at home

The LINK is compact enough to live on a kitchen bench and practical enough to use every day.

At 120mm x 120mm x 450mm and weighing between 2.4 and 2.6kg, it takes up less space than most espresso machines and travels easily in its included case — total travel weight sits between 8.4 and 8.8kg — making it just as at home in a holiday rental as it is in your kitchen.

Batch capacity runs from 50g to 100g, which is the sweet spot for home roasting — large enough to fill your hopper and keep you stocked for the week, small enough to roast two or three different coffees in a single session without committing to large quantities of any one of them. Roast times range from around 7.5 minutes at the shortest to 21 minutes at the longest depending on the profile, including cooling — meaning most roasts are done in well under 15 minutes from green to ready to rest.

The LINK is available in 100v (Japan), 110v (Americas), and 220v (all other) configurations, with plug types A, F, G, I, and N covered as standard and additional options available on request — so wherever you are in the world, there is a version of the machine that works for you. The roast chamber is aluminium, the hopper is double-layer borosilicate glass, and the body is powder-coated steel with Nylon PA66 fittings throughout — built to last, and built to be used regularly.

Getting Started

Getting up and running with the LINK at home is straightforward.

Download the LINK App on your smartphone, the LINK Studio software for your computer, and once you connect your roaster, update to the latest firmware.

Once you’re ready to roast, take a density reading of your green coffee using the included LINK density tube, and follow the app’s recommendations from there. The system handles the rest.

If you already own a LINK, updating to Addis 4.2 is free — open the LINK App and follow the firmware update prompt, or visit nucleuscoffeetools.com/link for full instructions. If you are new to the LINK, our team is always available to help you get started.

Learn more at nucleuscoffeetools.com/link, or see our list of global partners here.