Where can you get the good beans? Buy expensive? It is a good rule of thumb with other things, but not for coffee. Often it is just the opposite. The more expensive a roast is, the less buyers can afford it. It leads to longer shelf time for the costlier roasts. Not good, isn’t it?

Well, may be one should buy a fresh batch from a local roaster? It might work, if you have a good roaster who knows what he/she is doing. How many coffee roasting places you know in 5 miles area around you? I am lucky and I have at least three. But the catch is that they run a business and roasting in small batches is not an option for them. How fast can they sell a large batch? Not too quickly. Within three days guaranteed? Are you kidding me? This is why you end up getting a mix of freshly roasted with some slightly stale beans.

The verdict is – if you want good coffee, you have to make it yourself. This is why I started to roast.

At first I used a roaster that I received as a gift. It was a “Fresh Roast II”, an early predecessor of this machine.

Mine did  not have a digital thermometer and it did not have any means of the temperature control. But it produced coffee so much better than anything I could buy (more by chance than by design, I should say) that I’ve gotten hooked on coffee roasting.

It did not take me long to become unsatisfied with the lack of roasting control in the Fresh Roast II. When it fell off my counter and shattered into pieces about eight months into my exploration of coffee roasting I did not try to replace it with the same type of device. This roaster takes a few ounces of green beens at once. One batch is hardly enough for two espressos! Total absence of temperature control make roasting too quick. Temperature grows so fast that a couple seconds difference in roasting time  make a big difference in the final result. My requirement for the next roaster in the range of  20-25 minutes roasting time and about a pound of beans per batch.

Well, I have a roaster like that now. It is a self-made DIY rig made out of a set of  things that are not expected to be found together. It all sits on a chassis of an Omega photo enlarger. A few years back this enlarger was a dream of many photo enthusiasts. Now, it is a staple of garage sales.  A modified bread maker, a heat gun, and a digital thermometer with a thermocouple provide all the heat and spinning action. The heat gun can move up and down of the enlarger’s shaft providing fine control of amount of heat applied to the beans. As beans grow in size, distance between the spout of the heat gun and the beans reduces. I move the gun up the shaft a couple of times during roasting. This the roast relatively constant heat flow. At about 350F I am moving it higher up again to slow down roasting between the first and the second pop.  The rig produces a pound of perfectly roasted coffee within 30 minutes.

The coffee roasting rig

The idea of using a bread maker and a heat gun is not mine. I found it on the Youtube. The coarsest version of it is called “a heat gun and a dog bawl”. I think my design is a Cadillac of the roasters of this type. The only think that I might add to it is a temperature controlled heat gun, but I am not sure if it would add anything to the roast quality. You can see a video of this rig in action in my other post.

Stay tuned for an DIY description of the rig! Let me know if you are interested to encourage me writing the post!

This is the product it produces

Roasted Beans

Once PID is installed the next big thing is to find optimal brewing temperature for your setup. I found my sweet spot at 98C. The PID keeps boiler just below boiling point three degrees above optimal brewing temperature of 95C. This tree degrees drop happens while water travels through the gropuhead and warms up the grinds and  the portafilter.

I found that it does matter if the grinds fall into the porafilter directly from the burrs of the grinder or from a container. Free falling grinds give much more even fill to the porafilter and makes extraction so much better.

One thing I can tell with certainty. The result of extraction is an extraordinary drink. I did not have a chance to have a better espresso anywhere else. I can certainly tell that espresso foam is called “crema” for a good reason. When you drink espresso with good crema it tastes somewhat similar to Crème brûlée.

I am not sure if anyone is reading these posts. I am tempted to put little teasers in my posts to figure out if anyone is lurking here. Here is another teaser. Let me know about your existence by following me on Twitter, or by registering to this web site and I will share with some tips on getting great green coffee beans in Toronto or on the Internet and on really easy way to roast them.