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Winter 1998. Roasting Your Own Coffee Jury-Rigged Popcorn Popper Tricks You can use a "real" coffee roaster, your oven or a homemade one. The trick is to roast the coffee slowly on quite a low temperature. The beans should be roasted a bit darker than medium roast, except for some specific coffee which are better as dark roast. Roast to taste. I like them darker and and just starting to slick with oils Personally I dont like coffees that are too dark roasted. In my opinion it takes the fresh notes away and leaves the taste burnt and bitter. So how can I tell when the coffee has passed the limit? Well when the coffee starts to look "shiny" stop the roasting. The shine comes from oils inside the bean, this oil does not like the heat it is exposed to and will give you a bitter bite. the coffee will continue to roast while cooling. You can hear it sizzle. It takes me about an hour to grind the coffee I'll use for a month. Click any photo for a close up.
COUPLE OF NOTES on the coffee roasting. 1) It probably goes without saying, but this is an OUTDOOR activity. The smells generated while roasting aren't those same nice coffee shop smells. This has a very low wife acceptance factor doing this in the house. If you're in the house., use a window fan. 2) In the corn popper it's all about airflow. In one of the pics you can see I have the popper up on a grate. What you cannot see is that I cut a bunch of holes in the bottom cover of the popper. It had only a few louvers, but not enough. You may have to defeat the thermal fuse in your hot air poopper. 3) Supply: My friend gets his beans from some small place in Hawaii. We've also ordered from http://sweetmarias.com/ . There are a bunch of good suppliers. However, I got into this with some free beans, a supply I still use. A friend in Missouri did a robotic pallet packing machine for a Colombian coffee supplier. After the job they were left with a warehouse of green coffee in burlap bags. We packed up a huge bunch of it into good quality sealable 5 gallon buckets. It's been years since the job, but I am still using those arabica beans. They are dried beans and I believe they could last forever. 4) Lastly, don't make coffee with the beans you JUST ROASTED. Wait awhile. The coffee attains its peak 4 to 24 hours after roasting. It is freshest between day one and day five or six. Making a month at a time is overkill.
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