Roasting Coffee

Now for my spiel on roasting coffee beans. As most of you know, I roast my own beans. There are many methods for doing this, costing around $200 to almost nothing (aside from the bean cost).


Advantages:
-Roasting your own coffee beans ultimately should reduce your cost on coffee. Green coffee beans cost less than roasted coffee beans and they can be stored indefinitely as long as they are packaged correctly.There are many things about roasting coffee that are exciting! Not only can you create your own blends of beans and learn about different regions of coffee beans and how they taste, you can customize how you want to roast your beans exactly to your taste.
- The taste of freshly roasted beans is phenomenal. You will quickly become a snob (advantage or disadvantage?).

Disadvantages:
-Roasting beans doesn't typically take too much time (about 15 minutes) BUT it creates a good deal of smoke and you shouldn't use roasted beans right after the roasting. The taste is best about 24 hours after roasting.
- It can be difficult to find green beans

Luckily, there are sites such as Sweet Marias that ships green beans and offers advice about home-roasting!

For my home roasting, I use a Whirley Pop (Old fashioned stovetop popper) to roast my beans. This method is inexpensive but it does not give you very much control over temperature. I find that it serves my purposes well enough.

For other options check out this page: Roasting instructions

Happy Roasting!