Coffee Roasting

Mmmm ... Coffee

I love coffee. It's my only real vice. And I don't mean frappuccinos, I mean black coffee, espresso. As Will Durst says, "It's hot bitter, dirty water with a buzz".

To feed my addiction, I decided to roast my own coffee.

Why Roast Coffee?

Coffee looses flavor very rapidly after roasting. All the freezing, and C0₂-flushed bags in the world will not stop this decay. Keeping the beans whole only delays the inevitable -- flavor depends largely on when the bean was roasted, not when it was ground.

Unroasted (green) beans, in contrast, can be stored for a year with out loss of flavor. This means you can buy in bulk, and roast what you need, when you need it, and it will always be delicious. Green beans also costs about 1/2 the price of roasted coffee.

Equipment

I got an IRoast2:

IRoast2

IRoast2 (disassembled)

It's a hot air roaster. Basically, a hot air popcorn popper with a sophisticated control system. I got the IRoast because it supports a wide variety of roast profiles. i.e. it has a lot of knobs. You enter a list of temperatures, and times, and press start.

Beans

My roaster came with eight 1/2-lbs bags of green coffee:




Green Beans

Roasting

The online guides make roasting sound very complex, "best at a Full City roast, 30 seconds past 2nd crack." Huh? The first time I roasted, I threw in some coffee, pressed start, waited, and then pressed stop when it ressembled food. Tasted great. I'm sure some practice wouldn't hurt, but the point is, it's pretty easy to get good results.


Here's the beans before roasting:






Green Beans

Here's a few photos of a dark roast at various stages:

Roasting (green)

Roasting (light)

Roasting (dark)

And the final product:




Roasted Beans

The only downside is roasting can be a bit messy. The beans expel chaff (flecks of skin) as they roast.

But the biggest problem is smoke. Dark roasts cause the beans to sweat oil, which gets burned by the roaster. Roasting under my stove's hood solved most of the problem, but to really fix it I had to attach a ventilation duct:




Ventilation

Along with my torch working setup, my house is beginning to look like a scene from the movie Brazil :)

Conclusion

I don't want this to sound like a wine tasting review, so I'll just say that freshly roasted coffee is good -- really good. I roasted some Ethiopian that had a very strong and distinct fruit flavor. It was a like flavored coffee without the artificial taste. In 5 years of buying coffee at Peets I've never tasted anything like this. There's nothing like a hobby you can eat.

If you're looking to try roasting yourself, I highly recommend Sweet Maria's. They have loads of useful information, and good prices on roasters, and green beans.