Home Roasted Coffee Beans

Hi readers. I'm Ben Snitkoff, the other author of A Year From Scratch. Some of you may know me from TechnicallyLegal, Twitter, or ImprovBoston's Harold Night. Brian and I are taking one year, and each week we'll release a new recipe of something that you can make from scratch, but that most people either buy pre-made or make with a mix of some kind.

Brian started us with the salad staple croutons. I'm starting with something else people use every day. Coffee.

The art of coffee making has progressed a long way since the day an Ethiopian goatherder saw that his goats were a little bonkers after eating raw coffee beans.  But unless you live in an urban center, it is not particularly easy to find freshly roasted coffee beans.

While this method won't give you the fine grained control neccessary to make the perfect roasting curve, breaking out your old hot-air popcorn popper can get you to fresh, home-roasted beans. 

 

Equipment:

1 Hot-Air Popcorn Popper

1 Wire Strainer

1 Digital Scale

1 Wooden Spoon (not pictured)

Something that keeps time (also not pictured)

1/4 lb of coffee

Tupperware

You'll notice that all of these pictures are taken outside. This is not a coincidence. Roasting coffee beans makes a lot of smoke. Unless you have a very good hood on your stove, or a very forgiving landlord/fire department, you should really do this outside.

The fewer beans you use in your first few batches, the better. A rule of thumb is never to do more than a quarter pound (113 g) at a time.

This batch, I started with 91 grams of unroasted beans. You'll notice that these are a good deal smaller than the beans you're used to seeing. Their final color and size will depend on how long you roast them. 

Load the beans in to the top of the popper, put the top on, and place the strainer at the mouth, and turn that sucker on, and start a timer.

The beans should start spinning. It will take a little time for the popper to get up to full speed. If you feel like it, give the beans a little poke with the wooden spoon. It can't hurt. Eventually they should be spinning so fast that they look like this (at 1/80 shutter speed).

About three minutes in, the popper will start spitting out chaff. It's the outer casing of the coffee bean. It will look and feel a bit like dried leaves. I catch it in the strainer, and then toss it. It'd be great in a compost pile, whatever you do, make sure you get the chaff out of the strainer before you hit the 6 minute mark.

Around the 5 minute mark, it will vary based on the popper, amount of beans, outside temperature, you'll start to hear a cracking sound. This is the first crack. You'll also be getting a strong coffee aroma by now. Keep an ear on the cracking, and a nose on the scent. You'll probably want to stop the beans before they get to the second crack. The second crack is just what it sounds. After the beans crack once, they'll crack a second time. By the time they've gotten to the second crack they will have a very dark roast, and usually an oily texture. This is at the darker end of dark roasts. What most people called burned, but what I call delicious.

Once the beans hit your desired roast (between 5 and 6 minutes), turn off the popper and pour out the beans into the strainer. You'll want to cool off the beans by shuffling them around. They'll be steaming like this for a while. Once they're cool, put them in an airtight container to rest. You'll want them to rest for a day or two before you use them, but you'll want to use them within a week of roasting. You can see below the color and size differences between a green coffee bean, the first crack, and the second crack.

After a couple of goes, you'll start to get the hang of just how long to go for a given roast. 

Comments

[albert duncan]

if you dont have a popcorn popper any other good suggestion?

[Ben]

Albert, if you have a pot that you don't love you can roast coffee in that, on your stove, or, preferably, on a grill. You'll want to be stirring constantly, and you'll have to hand separate the chaff from the roasted beans. In the alternative, when the beans are done roasting, transfer the beans and the chaff to a metal strainer, take the lot of it outside and shake the strainer while spraying some compressed air on the beans and chaff. That should do a good job of separating.

Also, I say that one would preferably roast the coffee on a grill (put the pot on the grill, and the coffee in the pot) because if you try to roast it indoors, your home will fill with smoke. Delicious, coffee flavored smoke.

In the end, you can pick up a really good popper for $20 on e-bay. If you intend to make a hobby out of it, it's well worth the price.

Hope this helps.