Burned Beans
Today I tried roasting my own coffee beans. This all started a few months ago when Slashdot had a poll about what people drink in the morning, and all the coffee snobs basically said, “You really don’t know what a real cup of coffee tastes like until you try fresh-roasted beans.” This piqued my curiosity, so I bought some green coffee beans from the Red Door Cafe at Caltech, and I tried roasting them on the stove.
The Red Door Cafe gets its coffee beans from a local coffee shop called Jones Coffee. They have quite a variety of green and roasted beans, but the Red Door only has the Mexico Organic variety in green beans.
The first thing I learned is that roasting coffee beans produces a lot of smoke. Or, at least, when I did it, it produced a lot of smoke. I just put them in a skillet on the stove, and kept them moving so they wouldn’t roast unevenly. It was really neat to watch them get darker and darker, but soon the smoke was really coming off of them and I had to open all the windows to keep the fire alarms from going off.
Once they were as dark as… I thought they should be? …I let them cool a bit and then made a pot of coffee from them. I didn’t enjoy the coffee as much as the Major Dickason’s Blend I get from Peets, but I see the potential here. I think if I find a bean I like a lot more, and if I learn how to roast the beans to the proper darkness, I could probably make a great cup of coffee this way.
But, I don’t think this is something I will do frequently; it is a bit of a hassle.
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:10 pm
its true. fresh roasted beans are delish. we used to roast them at the office until we burned them a bit and the building people made us promise to never do it again.
very tasty though, it does take some getting used to.
June 24th, 2007 at 8:16 am
John - I have all kinds of questions!
What roaster did you guys use?
Did you try roasting at different temperatures? I read that roasting beans at different temperatures brings out different flavors.
How long did you keep roasted beans around? Did you roast once a day, or once a week, or what?
I just found a coffee roaster that boasts a catalytic converter to eliminate smoke, which looks pretty interesting. Of course, this also looks like the kind of thing that would be fun to build on your own… Probably a heat gun would be a great place to start…