Home Coffee Roasting Trial

On Wednesday, I finally got the chance to have a quick go at roasting my own coffee beans. I bought the green beans from my local coffee supplier the last time I bought our usual roasted beans: I had read that roasting your own using an electric hot-air popcorn popper is easy and achieves quite good results for the home-roaster. I followed this method from the Sweet Marias website.

First, I started off with the popper, green beans, a kitchen timer, a metal colander, a pot mitt and spoon - I took it all outside as I had read that a) the chaff which blows off the beans is a nuisance and b) the smoke can set off your smoke detector.

Then I ladled two big spoon fulls of beans into the popper, set the timer and turned it on.


As the instructions said, I could hear first 'cracks' of the beans at about 3 minutes and it continued for another 30 seconds or so? Lots of chaff flying around at this stage too. I watched closely for another 3 minutes, waiting to see if I could hear the second 'crack' - I don't think I did, but I was worried about the beans burning so I turned the popper off at that stage and tipped them quickly into the colander to cool down while I agitated them to speed their cooling.



Voila!

Freshly roasted beans are at their peak flavour between 4 and 24 hours after roasting, the instructions told me, so I bravely waited... 3 hours before succumbing to the smell (the smell!) permeating the house and grinding the beans.

As an aside, I have also read that standard blade grinders such as mine tend to burn the beans a little as they grind, which affects the flavour of course. I am still looking for a vintage hand-operated grinder, and fortunately they are the 'burr' grinder types, favoured by coffee aficionados (not that I am one of those... yet ;-). When I do find one, my electric blade grinder will go back into service as my spice grinder.

Beans ground...



Coffee made...



Ahhhhhhhh. Not bad. Not roasted dark enough for my liking; I like my coffee full-bodied and chocolatey (particularly because I'm wussy and drink mine with milk ;-)

Pretty good for a first effort though, I'll be doing it this way from now on for sure, as green beans are so much cheaper and I can roast them fresh every few days. Nice one.