After about an hour of hunt-and-pecking his comment into the little box, he turned to me and said, “Did you know there is a limit to how many characters they let you enter?” I had mercy on him and told him I would let him put his comments here, where there is OBVIOUSLY no character limit. (Have you seen some of my posts?)

But since it’s my blog, I think I’m entitled to get a few words in too. My comments are in brackets [] below.

All looks good. Your experience brought back fond memories of  all my early roasting ventures. [Begin dream sequence...] I started out with one brand spanking new Toastmaster popper. Half a cup of beans. 8 minutes to a dark roast,chaff everywhere in my garage and a bunch of smoke. [Not to worry - the fire department is just down the street.] Temporary sweet victory. No more Charbucks for me!

[He says to himself, he says] Wait a minute to come up with three or four pounds of coffee for a week supply [it isn't like we have a problem or anything] is going to take a while, I’m going to need more poppers. Off to Target I went for another popper. WOW they just put them on closeout. $4.00 a piece. I bought 4. [Without consulting me.] Now I can do some serious roasting with 5 POPPERS. Being in the constrution business [much like Tim Allen] I installed 3 extra electrical circuits in my garage so I can run air compressors,saws,etc., without blowing or kicking breakers [or the dog]. Now running 3 poppers at a time all on different circuits. The other circuit i would run a fan with a colander [my colander???] on top to dump the beans in for cooling. Yes I melted all plastic tops. Also I used tin cans [I made him eat ALL of those green beans] that fit the poppers for extensions – top and bottom cut out of the cans.Some poppers re…

And that’s where the Blogger box came up saying, “Enough already. This is Web 2.0 buddy. You need to get to the point and get out of here.” The plan was that he would finish his comments, but our weekend was busy and my husband would rather roast coffee than type, so he hasn’t gotten back to it yet.

We’ll probably find time to get together and post the rest of it (it is a good bonding activity ), but I’m not making any promises.

Um, yeah… remove the lid on the popcorn popper first. Sorry!

It’s hard to be annoyed with it for too long though, even if it is bulky and not-so-attractive. The thing makes me espressos or lattes whenever I want them, and not the way some wimpy little model from Bed, Bath and Beyond would do it.

If you ask my husband, he’ll tell you all about the bars of pressure and maybe throw in a few references to a pump. (I think it has a pump.) I like the fact that it makes his $300 coffee grinder seem like a good investment. (Oh, don’t give me that shocked look. We all pitched in for his birthday one year and FINALLY gave him something he really liked.)

And speaking of investments, guess how much money we sunk into this restaurant-grade piece of machinery? $24.99. He bought it, used and unloved, from a restaurant supply company.

That’s the only reason I didn’t kill him when he brought this home:

It also has a heated cup-warmer on the top and a hot water spigot, although I usually forget that and heat water for tea the old-fashioned way, in the microwave.

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.

First, I can tell you there is no need for dread. Roasting coffee probably won’t cost more than buying overpriced lattes at a coffee shop, and you’ll have better coffee. It also doesn’t require too much in the way of space.

I’ll have to interview my husband for the particulars (and he is particular) about where to get the best equipment, information, and coffee beans. (I hope to have links here on Monday.) But here’s a brief overview of the process:

My husband buys beans through a coffee-buying club, and owns a small roaster, which we set up in the garage. (In my opinion, you do not want the smoke and flying chaff inside your house!) After roasting, he cools the coffee in wire-mesh colanders and then puts it into non-airtight containers to let it breathe (or something). Then he transfers the beans to airtight containers, and we grind them fresh for every pot.

As I said in the comments, I highly recommend home-roasting as a hobby for husbands everywhere. (Mmm.)

Lest I give you the wrong impression, we do receive frequent shipments of green beans on our doorstep. And we have dropped quite a bit of cash into this hobby. But we’ve solved a problem in the process: once upon a time, none of us in the family knew what to give DH for birthdays and holidays. Now we do.

And it’s a gift that gives back.

I don’t consider myself much of a foodie, and yet I probably spent over an hour there reading the posts. Growing up, I had no time for the kitchen; I was busy reading books. It wasn’t until maturity knocked me over the head with a rolling pin that I realized I should graduate from the can opener and microwave and learn how to make things.

I started with a basic herb-roasted chicken, which came out of the oven absolutely perfect. I was amazed that all I had to do was open a book with pictures and follow the numbered steps and I could produce something delicious and impressive.

The next big challenge was what they call gravy in the South and Béchamel on the Food Network. What starts off as a weird lumpy mixture of butter and flour becomes – well, so many things. Alton Brown did a whole show on gravy. It’s that important.

I moved to breads and pie crusts. (Homemade French bread tastes 32,000 times better than store-bought. And the best part? Casually working into the dinner conversation that it’s homemade, thusly: “Oh, how is it? I might have let it get too warm during the second rise.”)

And did you know you can make yogurt? Recently I made yogurt after writing an article about food safety. That’s a job hazard right there. As I’m cooling the milk to just the right temperature I realize I’ve got my own little bacteria factory.

They’ll tell you not to bake bread on the same day that you make yogurt because the yeast stymies the growth of the cultures. I can tell you right now I’m never going to need that information. Are there actually people who make homemade yogurt AND bread on the same day?

Now for my picture, since I’m trying to be like Charmian, who is as talented with a camera as she is with butter tarts. This isn’t something I make, but I enjoy it every day – my husband roasts all of our coffee, using the best green coffee beans from around the world. Every morning is a geography lesson while I sip the hot black brew du jour. If you are jealous, you should be. He makes the best coffee. Here’s a picture of the beans cooling after being roasted:

And that monstrosity behind the coffee beans? That’s one reason NOT to be jealous, I guess. That’s our restaurant-grade espresso/cappuchino maker taking up half of my counter space. On the other hand, it does make great espresso and we can have it any time of the day or night, so yeah. I should be thankful.