The return of Home Roasting
After my last post, I went out and got a popcorn popper, because the coffee was FOUL. Acidic, and burnt and nasty. Take two, in the popcorn popper, wasn't burnt, but it also wasn't actually roasted. Ooookay....
So I followed a helpful hint and took the popper apart and removed the temperature regulator. I figured, worst case, it starts a fire, and second worst case, it doesn't work. So I used the outlet that has it's own breaker, and I kept the fire extinguisher handy and I went to town. It worked. Round three was drinkable, but kind of acidic. I kept worrying that I would be unable to hear the cracks, so after the second batch in the modified popper was also too light, I just decided to do a batch and let it go until I either heard the second crack, or I smelled the beans burning. The cracks are totally audible, as it turns out, and I finally achieved the flavor I was going for.
I'm now on my second purchase of green coffee from Sweet Maria's, a really cool outfit in Oakland that specializes in coffee for home roasters. They're nice folks, and have a ton of information about home roasting, even in something as jury-rigged as a popcorn popper. I'm trying coffees from all over the world, in a range of roasts. Ultimately, V and I kind of prefer darker roasts, but I occasionally enjoy lighter roasts. I picked up a Monsooned coffee this time around, and it's described as being "moon white zombie beans". Yup. They look WEIRD. In a few days, we'll see how they taste, as SM's recommended that you let the coffee rest for a few days after roasting. The process for the Zombie coffee is kinda like it sounds: coffee is stored though the monsoon season in India (usually, but mine is from Bali, it was apparently an accident), and the humidity soaks through the beans, altering their acidity and flavors. It apparently makes for some exceptionally foamy coffee, and I also purchased an espresso blend that uses monsooned coffee to get an excellent crema. I wonder what the monsooning does to the caffeine content?
All in all, home roasting is going much more smoothly with the modified popper, and we've had some extremely good coffees out of it. The other nice thing is that green coffee stores significantly longer than roasted coffee does, so I can get a wide selection at once without worrying about it going stale on me.
The only ISSUE I've had with the popper is that it smokes. A lot. Coffee roasts at a very high temperature, upwards of 400*F, in fact, and it smokes to high heaven. It smells grassy at first, like hay, and moves into toasted grains, and then into actually starting to smell like coffee. I don't mind my house smelling like any of these things, but the smoke carries oils, and those oils not only gunk up the things in my house, they will go rancid, and start to smell foul. Goody. So I tried roasting outside today. Weeeellllll... that didn't go so well.
We have no outlets outside, so we have an extension cord running out the back door and to our washing machine. This works pretty well, so I figured I'd try roasting out there. I was roasting a coffee that I picked up today, and have never played with before, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but half an hour into my roast, I had this sneaking suspicion that something was wrong. I went ahead and cooled it, and we'll try it tomorrow, but I think it's probably going to be weird. Only a few beans ever cracked, but it did finally start spitting teeny fragments of bean, which is the visual cue for the Second Crack. I felt like it had taken WAAAAY too long, and I also stuck my hand in the stream of hot air, and it felt not as hot as it ought. When I unplugged the popper, the extension cord was warm, so I think maybe we were just losing too much power to the long extension cord. I moved inside, and tried the same coffee hooked into the wall outlet with a breaker. The coffee reached Second Crack in about 8 minutes. Yeah. So roasting outside is time consuming, and doesn't work that well for me, so I get to find a new way to deal with the smoke issue. Oh, well.
So I followed a helpful hint and took the popper apart and removed the temperature regulator. I figured, worst case, it starts a fire, and second worst case, it doesn't work. So I used the outlet that has it's own breaker, and I kept the fire extinguisher handy and I went to town. It worked. Round three was drinkable, but kind of acidic. I kept worrying that I would be unable to hear the cracks, so after the second batch in the modified popper was also too light, I just decided to do a batch and let it go until I either heard the second crack, or I smelled the beans burning. The cracks are totally audible, as it turns out, and I finally achieved the flavor I was going for.
I'm now on my second purchase of green coffee from Sweet Maria's, a really cool outfit in Oakland that specializes in coffee for home roasters. They're nice folks, and have a ton of information about home roasting, even in something as jury-rigged as a popcorn popper. I'm trying coffees from all over the world, in a range of roasts. Ultimately, V and I kind of prefer darker roasts, but I occasionally enjoy lighter roasts. I picked up a Monsooned coffee this time around, and it's described as being "moon white zombie beans". Yup. They look WEIRD. In a few days, we'll see how they taste, as SM's recommended that you let the coffee rest for a few days after roasting. The process for the Zombie coffee is kinda like it sounds: coffee is stored though the monsoon season in India (usually, but mine is from Bali, it was apparently an accident), and the humidity soaks through the beans, altering their acidity and flavors. It apparently makes for some exceptionally foamy coffee, and I also purchased an espresso blend that uses monsooned coffee to get an excellent crema. I wonder what the monsooning does to the caffeine content?
All in all, home roasting is going much more smoothly with the modified popper, and we've had some extremely good coffees out of it. The other nice thing is that green coffee stores significantly longer than roasted coffee does, so I can get a wide selection at once without worrying about it going stale on me.
The only ISSUE I've had with the popper is that it smokes. A lot. Coffee roasts at a very high temperature, upwards of 400*F, in fact, and it smokes to high heaven. It smells grassy at first, like hay, and moves into toasted grains, and then into actually starting to smell like coffee. I don't mind my house smelling like any of these things, but the smoke carries oils, and those oils not only gunk up the things in my house, they will go rancid, and start to smell foul. Goody. So I tried roasting outside today. Weeeellllll... that didn't go so well.
We have no outlets outside, so we have an extension cord running out the back door and to our washing machine. This works pretty well, so I figured I'd try roasting out there. I was roasting a coffee that I picked up today, and have never played with before, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but half an hour into my roast, I had this sneaking suspicion that something was wrong. I went ahead and cooled it, and we'll try it tomorrow, but I think it's probably going to be weird. Only a few beans ever cracked, but it did finally start spitting teeny fragments of bean, which is the visual cue for the Second Crack. I felt like it had taken WAAAAY too long, and I also stuck my hand in the stream of hot air, and it felt not as hot as it ought. When I unplugged the popper, the extension cord was warm, so I think maybe we were just losing too much power to the long extension cord. I moved inside, and tried the same coffee hooked into the wall outlet with a breaker. The coffee reached Second Crack in about 8 minutes. Yeah. So roasting outside is time consuming, and doesn't work that well for me, so I get to find a new way to deal with the smoke issue. Oh, well.