How To Roast Coffee At Home
How to roast coffee at home always seemed to me to be an impossibly complicated and difficult undertaking.
I have long been a coffee aficionado. I readily admit that coffee is one of the pleasures of my daily life. Until recently, I coffee beans already roasted.
I had the impression, mistaken as it turns out, that roasting coffee was a difficult and highly technical task. Doing the research on coffee and all things coffee I found it is not difficult at all. In reality, I found it easy and enjoyable.
Some may call roasting coffee beans at home a hobby and I am okay with that. Any activity offering a break from routine and enjoyment has to be a good thing. Call it hobby, pastime or ritual, it adds to the pleasure of a good cup of coffee.
You can purchase a coffee bean roaster, but it is not necessary. The method I chose for this article on home roasting coffee beans is to use a fluid bed coffee roaster. Gotcha! A fluid bed coffee roaster, in this case, is a hot air popcorn popper!
My first attempts at coffee roasting began with a search for a Westbend Poppery II. I wanted to keep the equipment used for this article as simple and inexpensive as possible to demonstrate how easy it is to roast coffee at home. These popcorn poppers can be found for $3-$4.00 in thrift stores. I found one at my second stop, a Goodwill store, for $3.93. It looked in good shape and I bought it.
Then I had to find a source for green coffee beans. Trust me, there is no shortage of places to buy coffee beans online. I was looking for particular arabica coffee beans. (There are two types of beans, arabica and robusta. Arabica is the preferred type of coffee the finer coffees are made from). I wanted to try beans grown in Panama. I found a coffee bean supplier (to be named later) and ordered several pounds of green coffee beans of various single country origins.
Fair trade coffee and decaffienated coffee are readily available online if you prefer for your purchases.
Next step is preparation. Most of the equipment needed is found is every kitchen. I used a wire strainer, a colander, paper towels, a 1/2 cup measuring cup, mason jars and the Poppery II.
A word of caution: the roasting process creates a small amount of smoke. If you are indoors, be sure to vent properly or your smoke alarms will be activated.
I chose to use mason jars for storage. One reason is the lids can be left a little loose to allow the carbon dioxide the beans produce to be released and still maintain freshness. Mason jars are available in packages of 12 for about $9.00. I found some at the neighborhood hardware store.
Chaff, formed by the discarded husks from the beans, will form during the roasting process and be blown out of the popper and need to be caught. For this task the strainer with a wet paper towel in it worked well. However, it soon became apparent the towel would not stay wet because of the hot air being exhausted from the popper. In any event, the strainer by itself was adequate. If you pan roast or use a popcorn popper/nut roaster the chaff will have to be separated manually.
Once the beans have reached the desired roast they need to be cooled to stop the roasting process. The colander proved great for doing this. Panning the beans like a gold miner panning for gold cooled the beans quickly.
The Poppery II is a small capacity unit. It works best if no more than 1/2 cup of green beans are roasted at one time. Slowly add the beans and they will rotate from the air current. Keep adding the beans until the entire 1/2 cup has been added. The beans may stop circulating as more are added but will resume once they begin to roast and loose moisture.
The keys to roasting are color, cracking and smell. The beans will noticeably change colors and begin to emit audible cracking sounds.
Cracking occurs in two stages. The first is when the beans loose moisture. The second cracking is when a molecular change occurs in the beans. It is the time the beans are roasted between and after the cracks that determines the characteristics of the coffee brewed from them.
A guide for the different coffee roasts can be found here.
The first cracking began about three minutes into the process. This is the stage when the chaff begins to form heavily.
Listen closely and the cracking will begin to diminish. At this point most of the beans will be brownish in color and done to what is called a city roast. Coffee brewed from city roast beans will be milder in flavor.
The second crack will begin shortly after the first crack. In fact, I found it difficult to differentiate between the first and second cracks by sound alone. When the beans began to darken to a more ebony color I knew the second crack was underway.
From this point on it is a matter of taste. The longer the beans are roasted the stronger the brew will be.
If you notice a burning smell or odor, you have reached the limit. This dark, fully roasted coffee is not popular in the United States.
Each batch of beans roasted in the Poppery II will yield about six coffee scoops of beans. I use four scoops of beans, ground fairly fine, per 10 cups of water in most coffee makers.
The beauty of using the popcorn popper is the ability to experiment. Because only a 1/2 cup of beans are roasted at a time, it is easy to try different roasts and varieties of beans.
The Panama beans turned out to be very flavorful when done to a city roast. The aroma, flavors and character were a very pleasant diversion from the strong brews found in most coffee houses and blends.
Future articles will be about my experiences roasting green coffee beans in a wok and a popcorn popper/nut roaster.
Until then, happy coffee roasting!
by: David Ognek
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