This morning the UPS man, sporting his spiffy brown uniform, brought me a box of home coffee roasting equipment and supplies from The Coffee Project. The basic starter kit contained several varieties of raw coffee beans, the book Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival, by Kenneth Davids, and a FreshRoast 2.5 ounce roasting machine that looks like this:
What I'm going to do over the next few weeks is try to get to the bottom of the home coffee roasting phenomenon. First I'll learn how to roast my own coffee beans. Then I'll brew coffee with my home-roasted product. I'll examine the question of how quickly coffee degrades once roasted. And I'll conduct some comparisons of my home-roasted coffee against commercially roasted coffees.
Along the way, I'll be trying to educate myself about coffee in general. I'm basically a coffee neophyte. My coffee comprehension at this time extends only as far as "I like it"/"I don't like it."
I also aspire to develop a caffeine addiction.
Tonight I unpacked the machine, cleaned the glass container with warm soapy water as specified in the instruction manual, and roasted a batch of Columbian "Supremo Bucharamonga Especial." Though this sounds like something drug kingpins do to punish deviant underlings, it is a kind of coffee bean. Before roasting, however, I tried to familiarize myself with the instruction manual and the Kenneth Davids book. But ultimately I resorted to e-mailing James Vaughn at The Coffee Project in the hopes that he would send me the idiot-proof, executive-summary version of the instructions. He did:
There are two distict sounds you'll hear when roasting. The first is a kind of crack, like twigs breaking. The second sound is more of a sizzle as the beans darken. The sizzles are the sugars carmelizing, and we like that. I suggest letting the coffee roast until you hear this second sizzling sound, you will also see wisps of smoke at this point. If the timer hasn't already run out set the machine to "cool". The beans will continue to roast a bit more as they cool down. Don't go too dark on the first roast, better to err on the lighter side than ruin a batch by making charcoal.
With that advice in mind I activated the machine and it made a startling noise. I don't know what I expected. I guess I didn't think it would make a noise. But actually it seems to have inner workings similar to those of a hot-air popcorn popper. (I subsequently learned, through further exploration of the Davids book, that you can use certain models of hot-air popcorn poppers for this task.) So it makes a noise like a small jet engine. Not terribly loud, but loud enough to startle both me and my dog, who observed the process with more than a little curiosity.
The beans, propelled by the hot air, bounced around like Mexican jumping beans and for a minute or so jumping seemed to be all they were doing. Eventually, odors started to emanate from the machine but they were totally un-coffee-like -- sort of a decaying vegetable-matter smell. Eventually, I heard the promised first round of crackling and the beans started taking on the color of roasted coffee beans. At long last, just as I was thinking I must have missed the second round of noises -- the much anticipated sizzles -- they arrived. Almost immediately after I heard sizzling, a little smoke started coming out the top of the machine and within just a few seconds the entire apartment was filled with the most wonderfully comforting aromas of roasted coffee that I've ever had the pleasure of inhaling. I switched the machine to "cool."
Once the cooling cycle was complete, I placed the beans in a glass mason jar that originally housed Marie's blue cheese dressing and then, for a time when we had an inexplicable surplus, several small boxes of dental floss. Apparently I am not allowed to make actual coffee until tomorrow because the beans need to rest overnight. So, until then . . .
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