Coffee

[Tim_S]

Ken,

We roast our own coffee. It is truely better than anything you can buy, if only because you get just the roast you want.

Unlike you I didn't get any fancy equipment, just use the oven. I can roast enough on a cookie sheet for about a week and a half. It is quite smoky. I understand the roasters produce less smoke.

It is actually a lot cheaper too. I work near Emeryville which is where most of the South American beans come in to the West Coast. I found a wholesale distrubutor who would sell bags to anyone. You just had to buy the whole bag. If that doesn't sound bad keep in mind that a bag of coffee is 120-150 lbs. Still I paid about 1/8 of the store price for the Columbian Supremo.

Roasting in the oven is pretty easy, spread them out in a single layer on a cookie sheet and put it in a hot (475) oven. After a while they start to pop, like popcorn, but they don't expand as much. There is a second pop that sounds a little different from the first, and that means they are almost ready. At that point I go by color and oil on the surface of the bean.

In the oven you don't get a perfectly evenly roasted batch. Around the outside of the pan the beans are (for my favorite roast) dark and oily, while the middle is chocolate brown, with no surface oil. I think having the variation adds to the complexity of the taste, which I enjoy.

Jak:

The smell is actually terrible while they are roasting. You know that burnt bitter flavor in a really dark French or Viennese roast coffee? That is the smell of roasting coffee. The beans don't take on that wonderful smell we all associate with coffee until they have absorbed some CO2 from the air, which takes several hours. In fact if you brew coffee right after roasting it tastes awful.

Ken, is this any different with the dedicated roasters like you use. I was thinking if there is more air flow in those, it might not take as long for the beans to mellow?

--tks

[winwintoo]

I think I'm going to order one of these....

http://www.pimprig.com/images/review...ine-img047.jpg

Margaret

[jeaniesa]

From the descriptions here, I'm thinking that perhaps the coffee you get from home-roasting is similar to the coffee I had in Spain. I'll never forget how strong the coffee was, but there was absolutely no bitterness! I tried and tried to recreate it at home, but had no luck.

Unfortunately, now, I can't drink coffee at all. So, my beverage of choice these days is green tea.

Jeanie

[KenB]

Tim_S , the machine I bought is a Caffe Rosto, one of the reasons dedicated roasting machines are better is because after the roasting cycle is done, 7 to 13 minutes, depending on the bean and your personal tastes, the machine goes into a cooling cycle for about 4 or 5 minutes. Still, you wait at least 24 hours before brewing for the best taste to develop.
It is much cheaper in the long run to roast your own, here, the better unground and pre roasted beans are around $10.00 per pound. The ones I buy online run right around $5.00 a pound. As with most everything though, you can pay about as much as you want to. One variety called Kopi Luwak, is selling for $300.00 per pound and probably youo couldn't find any to buy if you wanted to.
Glad to meet a fellow home roaster.

Ken

[DannyRaphael]

My neighbor (two houses down) works at the Starbucks corporate HQ in downtown Seattle. In exchange for pics of her kids, I get some pretty good stuff (coffee, that is ).

[KenB]

Margaret, that computer is all that is missing here

Ken

[Tim_S]

Ken,

Well, I'm afraid that cooling the beans is manual too. We just dump them in a large sieve and shake them around a while. This serves two purposes, one to cool the hot beans, and also to dislodge the skins.

To those of you not aware, there is a thin papery skin on the bean that is fairly bitter if you end up brewing it. It ends up floating out of the sieve like brown snow.

Happy brewing.

--tks