It began as an online quest to see if a $200 coffee roaster touted in a press release for kitchen gadgets was a deal or not.
It ended in our kitchen with a pan full of smoky dark beans, an exhaust fan at full speed and open doors and windows on a 45-degree day.
The hook on the press release was an average savings of $5 to $6 a pound by roasting your own coffee at home. (If you do the math, your $200 roaster is paid for after 40 pounds of coffee.) There was also blather about “connecting” with the food and beverages you consume. You know, looking your green coffee bean in the eye before you toss it in a 500-degree oven. Try not to name your beans, though. That just makes it harder.
Well, searching for information on roasters led to numerous Web sites and prices ranging from under $100 to about $1,000 (roast only 200 pounds of coffee and it pays for itself). One thing led to another, and I wound up at INeedCoffee.com, and an article by James Cameron, “Roast Your Own Beans,” that informed me the only investment I needed for that great cup of java was the green coffee beans themselves.
Here are the requirements: said beans, an oven, a cookie sheet, an oven mitt, a metal colander and a wooden spoon. Hey, I had all those things. Well, except the beans.
The Internet is awash in sources for ordering green coffee beans, but if you want the human connection, just drop in at Bargreen Coffee Co., 2821 Rucker Ave. in Everett. Go to the counter in Cafe Amore, the coffee shop next door to the roasting operation. For $6.80, I bought a pound of green Kenya coffee. There are other options, including Ethiopian, Colombian — pretty much anything they roast there themselves.
Beans in hand, I went home and turned to Cameron’s instructions:
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees, spread raw beans evenly in a single layer on the cookie sheet and put the sheet on the oven’s middle rack. In about eight minutes you’ll hear a consistent crackling noise, and you’ll have a lot of smoke with a burnt coffee smell. Cameron advises that you keep a close check for the next two or three minutes, until the beans are as dark as you like them. (He warns, “NEVER leave your roasting coffee beans unattended.” Maybe they explode or catch on fire. I don’t know — I just did what he said and stayed there.)
Remove the cookie sheet from the oven (that’s what the mitt is for, if you didn’t know), pour the beans into the colander and start stirring with the spoon to cool things down as quickly as possible. You can do this at your sink or outside, since a fair amount of chaff comes off as you stir.
And that’s all there is to it. I was surprised how easy it was, and that the smoke and smell dissipated fairly soon.
For another inexpensive method, you can use a hot-air popcorn popper, Cameron writes, and keep an eye on the beans until they get to your desired darkness. Also, you’ll want to do this outside your house somewhere, as the popper will be blowing the chaff out into the air.
For my experiment, all that was left was to grind my oven-roasted beans and make a pot of coffee. In the spirit of getting back to the basics, I pulled out an old manual grinder we bought back around 1970 as a kind of decorative object, then discovered it actually worked. And it still does, long after several electric grinders have died.
The batch of drip coffee turned out to be OK. In fact, it was quite good. Maybe bonding with your beans really does make a difference.
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