Carolyn Erickson

Because I am a notorious tightwad, I’m going to start with the money involved in roasting coffee.

The Cost

The last time I bought a pound of fancy coffee from the specialty store it cost me $8.95. Today I checked prices online and Starbucks sells a pound of their Organic Sumatra ~ Peru Blend for $13.95.

My husband purchases green (as in unroasted) Sumatra Gayo Mountain organic coffee beans for $2.60 per pound. The price includes shipping. No kidding.

And while buying beans from a specialty coffee retailer is probably fresher than buying a can of the already-ground stuff, some home-roasting afficianados estimate the beans may have been in the bags for at least 4 months. That’s not very fresh.

Okay, so the beans are not nearly as expensive and probably fresher, but what about the equipment? Will you need to take out a small loan and purchase an abandoned factory to brew your own?

The Equipment

Don’t laugh. My husband started roasting coffee in the garage using hot-air popcorn poppers.

Okay, go ahead and laugh a little. I laughed when he first described this method to me. But I quickly sobered up when I had the first cup of coffee he made this way.  It was fantastic.

He’s graduated from popcorn poppers to the more elegant Behmoor 1600, a roaster with a one-pound capacity and a smoke-suppressing design. (This model can supposedly be used indoors, with a little help from the stove’s exhaust fan. DH tells me this would work for a light roast, but in our dark-roast-loving household the machine is banned to the garage.)

We love our Behmor, but it is certainly not the only alternative for serious coffee snobs. Some do it over the stove with a Whirly-Pop and others use a cast-iron skillet and a wooden spoon. Some use heat guns and a dog bowl! Some guys my husband knows of have converted their gas grills into coffee-roasters and yet others have rigged up computerized controls for their air-poppers like this.  DH says some of these guys are genius inventors and some of them are nuts!

Before you break out the welding equipment though, you might check here or here for other coffee roasting machines. If you don’t have a garage, look for roasters with smoke-suppressing features and fire up that exhaust fan on the range hood.

The Beans

  Obviously, they’re going to need to be green. You may be able to find a local coffee shop that sells green coffee beans, but if not, the Internet provides a bevy of options. My DH recommends Burman Coffee Traders from personal experience, but says that Sweet Maria’s is also a very reputable site.  

According to my husband, a pound of green beans after being roasted and ground yields approximately 13 to 14 ounces of coffee, so you’ll want to buy accordingly.

The Know-How

Before you fire up the poppers of course you’ll want to make sure you know what you’re doing. There are terms like “first crack” and “cupping” I hear my husband tossing around. You’ll want to know them too. Sweet Maria’s Coffee Library is full of useful information (including more about the various methods of roasting coffee) along with photographs and illustrations. It also includes a long list of links to other sources online and in print. Michael Prince is the Coffee Geek and his other site, CoffeeKid, has more information than you ever thought you needed to know about brewing, roasting, and enjoying coffee and espresso.

And if you have a question, check out the Green Coffee Buying Club or Coffee Geek forums or the Australia-based Coffee Snobs forums. You’ll find likeminded coffee snobs from around the world, with suggestions for just about any situation that could arise with home roasting. Lurk a while and see if you can find some sort of consensus or discover who the more knowledgeable members are. Because you know what opinions are like.

The Time Investment

Once you know what you’re doing, roasting a pound of coffee from start to finish with the Behmor 1600 takes about 30 minutes. With the popcorn-popper method, you could probably do it in about an hour and a half. The time will be proportionately less if you use multiple poppers. (My husband can’t give an exact estimate, because being a contractor and over-achiever, he had as many as 4 poppers running on 4 different circuits at one time.)

Did I leave anything out? For me, the fun part is waking up to it every morning.

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