Home Roasting With a Popcorn Maker
I started my home roasting with an air popcorn maker. I probably should have waited as I have a 6 month supply of coffee at my house. However the urge finally overtook me and I ordered some green coffee beans from sweet 
I am only able to make some batches of 50 grams each. This works out to about two cups of coffee for 8 minutes of work.
I have tried three different varieties and have made a half dozen batches so far. I haven't burnt any of the beans and so far each version has been amazing.
The roasting process just fills the house with these amazing smells. Some of it is chocolate and other times it smells like licorice. It's quite an amazing smell. Now one must remember that roasting coffee beans give off the same toxic chemical as microwave popcorn. Diacetyl is the culprit here. I plan on mitigating this in two different ways. First, my house is always open. One of those things awesome things about living in the tropics. The second thing is if I get addicted to roasting more I will then just start roasting outside. That would also solve my chafe problem. It isn't necessarily a problem for me as I am working with very small quantities right now.
I've roasted the coffee for as little as 5 minutes and as long as 8 minutes.
I like the darker roasts but prefer espresso or a strong cup of coffee. After roasting them in the popcorn maker I put them in a colander to cool off and to try and remove any chafe that I see. After about a minute I will drop them into my airtight glass container. I picked up a few different sizes at Ikea. You are supposed to give it the roasted beans a day before you grind and drink them due to the continued release of carbon dioxide. I think it's interesting because when you first out the beans in the container there is barely any smell. Come back later and open the container and wham the smell just rushes to your waiting nostrils. It becomes an addiction.
As I mentioned earlier each roast has turned out amazing. The flavors just explode from the coffee.
At home, I am a big coffee drinker. My wife does have a cup from time to time but really just sticks to having a shot added to her cinnamon rum on the weekends. I heat the cinnamon rum and froth it first. The coffee is made with Aeropress. For me, I use a shot of Aeropress on the weekdays and then I make flat whites on the weekends.
I like to try coffee both with and without milk to make sure I like the taste. I've yet to make cold press with my roasted coffee. Haven't really been around to try.
It's just so smooth and so full of flavor that I really think it's worth the extra time.
- Roast the beans
- Grind the beans the next day
- Make the coffee right after the grind
- Enjoy the complexities of the coffee.
I think my obsession with coffee started when we lived in Alpharetta and we took our first trip to santo Domingo about 5 years ago. I bought a bag of santo Domingo coffee and thought it was the best coffee I had ever tasted. I found out later that I could order it through a company out of Miami. When we moved to St Thomas I found out that Santo Domingo was sold in the stores! After buying them for awhile I ventured out to trying other Caribbean coffees. Yes, this was at the urging of my wife.
The next step was to bring some back from Puerto Rico. The coffees averaged $2 a lb there. That was about 60% cheaper than what I paid in St Thomas! With these cheap prices we decided that I should just buy a variety to try.
Our frequent visits made it easy to try the Puerto Rico coffees and I started understanding which coffees I liked and which ones were not so good.
I did this same thing on our next trip to Santo Domingo. I bought a whole suitcase full! This happens to be December of 2014. This also coincided with even more international travel. (Thank you low oil prices!)
We started to travel more internationally and the coffee prices were far cheaper than the states. I started with picking up several bags in Tahiti and New Zealand. After that I bought some whole bean at a rum festival. This led to buying a grinder. I use to have a grinder but it was cheap and it was a blade. I had no idea how awful it was at grinding till I got a burr Grinder many years later. I lost a lid in one of my many moves and never bothered to replace it.
Come to think of it I did try lots of different coffees in Austin but I was only using a drip coffee maker. Even the coffee maker makes a huge difference. My purchase of my Aeropress also took me much closer to the dark side.
Anyways, the coffee was dirt cheap in Spain (and it has to be some of the worst coffee in the entire world) and there too I picked up a suitcase full. By this time I was already on the fence if I should continue to purchase whole-bean or ground coffee. I had several bags and cans of coffee that were just not very good. Usually, it was due to bitterness.
The Italy trip saw me buying three bags of whole-bean coffee. Back home I started to flirt with cold press coffee. I had made it in the past but now I had a burr grinder(very cheap) and a better grasp on how I like my cold press coffee to taste. The key to cold press is to use a coarse ground and that meant grinding my own due to only buying espresso grinds on my trips.
Our next trip was to Paris. That would be the last trip where I purchased any ground coffee. China was also there but they didn't even have any instant coffee.
That brings us to today where I now am happily grinding my own. I'm going to seek out other opinions on my roasting skills. I am sure I am biased to my own particular tastes.
In one week we will be heading to Medellin, Columbia. I hope to bring back some green coffee beans from there. If I don't then the next trip to Puerto Rico is a coffee festival and I know for a fact I can get some during that event.