This is a continuation from
Home Coffee Roasting 101.
So... what is the bare minimum you need to get started? Financially, you need about $50. You need some 'green' coffee beans and something to roast in/with. The roaster can be a skillet on the top of your stove. A common beginner roaster is a traditional hot-air popcorn popper. Some folks will use a stainless steel bowl and a cheap heat gun. There's a large variety of home made/assembled roasters along with commercially built roasters for home use. I'll talk more about roasters in a bit. These days there are quite a few places from which you can get green beans, too. However, I still point everyone to my favorite place that has never done me wrong -
Sweet Maria's. I recommend getting their
eight pound sampler as you'll get 8 different quality coffees of varying origins for $5/lb + shipping. (Green coffee kept cool, dry, and out of direct sunlight will remain high quality for a year or more.)
For what it's worth, Sweet Maria's was founded by Tom and named after his wife, Maria. Tom travels the world selecting the beans he sells and grading coffees. Sweet Maria's specifically caters to home roasters. If you get bored with what I'm writing, jump on over to the
Sweet Maria's Getting Started guide. Of course, you can kill days just absorbing everything in
their Library.
I personally started out using a hot air popcorn popper. One of the most coveted air poppers is the
West Bend Poppery. However, any popper of the correct design should work...
the correct design has louvers around the chamber. The
wrong design has a screen in the bottom, instead. This will let you roast ~ 1/4 pound of green beans at a time with a roast taking ~15 minutes. Depending on how often you make coffee, this may work just fine for you. In my case, I quickly got to a state where I was frequently running 3 poppers which kind of became work and also would trip breakers.
At the time, the cheapest off the shelf home roaster was close to $500 and would only roast 1/2 pound at a time. I had joined a home coffee roasting community that explored lots of options for building your own home roaster. Some folks created cages that ran on a rotisserie motor inside their gas grill. Some people successfully modifed and converted home bread machines to be roasters. In my case, I decided to go
the SCTO (Stir-Crazy Turbo-Oven) route This remains a
very affordable and capable option that requires only minimal modification to roast a full pound at a time. You can set this up for $150 or less.
What else are you going to need?
- Ventilation - Coffee roasting produces a lot of smoke. If you don't have a good hood fan or a solid means to exhaust outside, then you may want to do your roasting outside. Since I moved to TX the temperatures stay warm enough that I can roast year-round under my carport at the front of my garage. When I lived in MO I built an enclosure so I could roast in my garage and vent out a window.
- Cooling - Beans fresh out of the roaster are very hot. You want to cool them fairly quickly at the end of the roast to stop the roasting process and so you can store them. I have a couple cookie sheets, a small fan, a couple collanders, and a gallon ziploc bag that I use. You can just see the cookie sheets and fan in this image. I dump the hot beans on the top cookie sheet and let the fan blow over them. This, incidentally, helps blow away some of the chaff. After a couple minutes I dump the beans onto the other cookie sheet and position them back in front of the fan. After a few more minutes I dump the beans into one of the collanders, point the fan up, and dump the beans back and forth between the two collanders for a few minutes. This allows them to finish cooling and blows away most of the rest of the chaff.
- Broom and dustpan and/or Shop Vac - As you roast coffee it will slough off a very fine brown skin called chaf. It's a lighter color and a little more delicate than, but similar to the skin of a spanish peanut. It will go everywhere. If you look at the encloser mentioned above, you'll see chaff laying all around the roaster. You'll also get chaff all over the place during the cooling process.
- Storage - You're going to need some kind of container in which to store your beans. I'll cover this in more detail in a future post, but you can do something as simple as a craft paper bag, a ziploc bag, a mason jar, or standard canister or something more purpose suited such as bags or canisters with one-way valves. I actually use the ziploc listed under Cooling strictly to transfer the beans from the collander to my storage canister... it's hard to pour them directly from the collander into the canister.
That's it... if you have a roaster and those few accessories then you're good to go.
My next post,
Home Coffee Roasting 103, is going to talk a little bit about coffee beans and then we'll get to the roasting itself.
