Hi, my wife (this be her account) asked me to look at this and post.
My name is Greg and I’m a coffee addict
(Hello, Greg)
Here’s the short version:
- Yes, you can roast your own using an air popper. Search alt.coffee (e.g., via groups.google.com) to find out which ones are good. Something like “air popper ebay” should turn up tons of posts.
- Yes, you can buy machines, ranging from slightly-better-than-air-poppers ($75) to state-of-the-art drum roasters ($300 - $3000 for one you’d want at home).
- Yes, you can buy beans online. Get thee hence to Sweet Maria’s Coffee . There are other sites; Coffee Bean Corral comes to mind, Google can find others. Sweet Maria’s is the BEST as far as providing good descriptions of the coffee and informative gear reviews, which I find helpful when buying.
- Why would you? Fresh coffee is better, period, full stop. Fresh means freshly roasted; green beans stay fresh for months if not years; roasted coffee stays fresh for days; ground coffee stays fresh for hours. The crap you get in a tin at the store was fresh sometime in living memory, but not now. I don’t consider myself a skilled roaster, but some batches I’ve made have literally been mood-altering, they were so good.*
Here’s the long version:
Lambo:
Yes, a corn popper is the most inexpensive way to get started; you can find them for $5-$10 at the Salvation Army if you’re lucky. I’ve never gone that route, but many people who do are quite satisfied with it.
The next option up is a specially made air roaster like the Fresh Roast Plus, which is what I use. These run around $75. My wife got me one for my birthday a few years ago and I’m just flat-out addicted to fresh coffee since then.
With any roaster, you’ll want to look at the reviews at Sweet Marias, do some googling in alt.coffee, and see what people say. All the various roasters tend to have a bias in the way they roast, and it’s a YMMV thing - if you like it dark, for example, avoid roaster X.
Finally - smoke. Coffee roasting generates smoke. If you live in an apartment, this may be limiting. I have to roast in the laundry room so I don’t set off the fire alarms. Some of the higher end roasters (like the Hot Top drum roaster) have filters to capture the smoke.
Ethilrist:
Yes, beware. I used to be able to drink anything, even day-old-sitting-in-the-glass-pot coffee. The more fresh coffee I drink, the less I like the rest of the world’s coffee.
Microwaving it won’t work - microwaves work by heating up water, roasting works by applying heat - but you can roast coffee in your oven. Most people who try it report middling success. You can also roast stove top; there’s a stove top popper available for $40, and I’m informed that back in the old days, people would just throw green beans in a pan and stir them.
Generally:
If you get into home roasting, you might also want to look into making coffee with a vacumn pot. Bodum makes a simple electric one; I’ve got the 25 oz version, the Bodum Mini Santos. MUCH better coffee than you get with a drip pot.
- Here’s an experiment. If you can, go to Trader Joe’s and buy one of their coffee tins, which are packed with some sort of inert gas to keep the coffee fresh (interaction with oxygen - oxidation - is what makes coffee go stale). Open it, grind it, make some. Continue doing so. As the days pass, you’ll notice that the coffee has less Oomph, less flavor. That’s the coffee staling.