I roast my own coffee. It is not really a choice. It is more a necessity, if you care about the drink. I tried to avoid this technically complicated endeavor. I drink coffee made in a French Press or in an Espresso machine. Both of these devices extract flavor from the beans intensely. And, as you might imagine, it is a “garbage in – garbage out” proposition amplified intensely. If coffee beans are just right, the drink is delicious and satisfying. But if the beans are rancid or badly roasted, yaiks! Starting with the good, freshly roasted beans is a necessity.

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

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