The joy of home roasted coffee.

In My Humble Opinion
1

A couple weeks ago a co-worker gave me a bunch of green coffee beans that been given to him for Christmas. After doing a bit of searching on the internet, I found a site that tells how to roast coffee using a hand crank popcorn popping pan. I have a popcorn pan I haven’t used in years so I put it to use. I discovered a couple of things real fast. Roasting coffee makes a lot of smoke. A whole lot. Plus the house tend to smell like this smoke for a few days. I have been using the side burner on my gas grill outside the garage and this has worked pretty good. And the coffee I have roasted has been good to great. Yesteday a another co-worker returned from a trip to Hawaii and presented me with a 2 pound bag of Kona beans, it’s not the Kona mix normally found in most stores. This morning I roasted me a batch of the Kona beans, ground them while still warm and made me a pot of coffee. I am in Heaven. The flavor is strong without a bite and there is no bitterness at all. This is easily one of the best cups of coffee I have ever had. Excuse me, I going for a refill.

2

I always wanted to try roasting my own coffee beans. I saw a batch of green coffee at the local bagel shop and briefly entertained purchasing some just to fool with it and see what happened. Maybe I’ll make that a weekend experiment now that I’ve heard the good results!

-foxy

3

My brother is hooked on roasting/grinding his own. He roasts his in a wok. He never mentioned the smoke; are you sure you aren’t overroasting yours?

4

Nope. After posting this morning, I checked out a couple of online bean sellers. Both also sell coffee roasters and the all the roasters are sold with hose adaptors to vent the smoke outside. Here is the site I used to get the info for roasting in a popcorn popping pan and they mention the smoke problem. In fact, I have found the amount of smoke tells me when the beans have been roasted enough, when the smoke is so thick in the pan I can’t see the beans, they are done. I have also found taking a deep breath of the smoke is not such a good idea, it took me about 10 minutes to get my full breath back.