Coffee Roasting

I drink coffee. Not only do I drink coffee, I do care enough about the coffee that I make at home that I did a lot of research to decide what kind of machine and what brand and model to buy. In addition to the hardware, there is the software, and I try to get freshly roasted beans. Unfortunately, my favorite local coffee roaster sold his business, and the new owners cannot reliably deliver the same quality of coffee.

So, how can I make sure that I always have freshly roasted coffee beans available? Or, as some of my friends would put it, how can I waste even more time on my morning cup of coffee?

Of course, home roasting is the answer to that question.

How to turn a bag of green coffee beans into something that can be used in a coffee maker or an espresso machine? After some serious research online I noticed that one company name came up again and again: Sweet Maria’s Home Coffee Roasting Supplies.

More after the jump…In addition to the 5 pounds of the Espresso Monkey Blend, I also got the espresso sampler pack (this is what’s left, I already went through three of the samples):

OK, I have green coffee beans, and I want to end up with something like this:

How do I do that? My first attempts were not very successful – I tried to use a hot air popcorn popper. There are numerous reports online from people who are able to use such a cheap device to roast some fine coffee. My popper however did not get hot enough. I was not even able to get to the first crack stage of the roasting process.

There are a bunch of other methods like pan roasting, or fire roasting, but I wanted something simpler, something that would just work. I can always spend some time in the future on a home build propane heated roaster. I decided to go with an entry level home roasting machine:

Let’s roast a batch of beans… First, take the batteries out of the smoke detector.

The FreshRoast is not a machine to roast a large batch of coffee, it can do about 2 1/4 oz. at a time. That’s not much. I usually do three batches in a row (with the required 20 minutes of cool down time in between the batches).

It’s fun to watch the coffee get darker and darker. At the beginning, the beans are greenish, and look more like split peas than like roasted coffee.

Within a few moments in the hot air stream, they slowly start to turn brown. At first we have something that looks like roasted peanuts. This is the stage where the beans release a grassy smell, which turns into the smell of hay.

The beans get moved around the roasting chamber by hot, rapidly moving air.

Once the beans dry, some of the chaff comes off the beans, and the air stream will move these light pieces of bean skin to the chaff collector.

A slightly darker shade of light brown.

An even darker shade of light brown.

A light shade of medium brown.

A medium shade of medium brown.

A darker shade of medium brown.

The experts of course know that we are moving through the different roasting levels of cinnamon, half city, New England, full city, … And, I’ll stop trying to make up descriptions for the different roasting levels.

I usually stop the roasting during or shortly after the second crack stage. The beans will have a slightly shiny surface at that point, because some of the internal oils will have traveled to the surface.

After cooling, and some more chaff removal, this is what the beans look like:

The FreshRoast Plus 8 has relatively good chaff collector. After the top cools down enough, it’s very easy to get rid of the collected chaff.

The beans are ready to be used for espresso after about 12-24 hours.