Home-roasted coffee no. 3
April 6, 2012 
3 Comments
With the return of warmer weather, I took some time last weekend to roast another batch of coffee with my heat gun. I do all my roasting outside so I don’t have to worry about containing the chaff, but that does kind of limit my options in the winter, even a mild winter like we had this year.
I didn’t change anything about my technique from earlier roasts, but the whole process seemed to go faster and smoother than I remember. Clearly confidence plays a role in coffee roasting. I also managed to achieve a darker roast than I had in the past. I’m now sure that I hadn’t quite been hitting first crack before, since I could distinctly hear popcorn-like popping in this batch. Naturally, the coffee these beans produced was markedly superior to my previous efforts, with fewer vegetal notes. An eminently satisfying cup.
The one new thing I did do this time around was measure my yield: the 227g of green beans I started with (that’s half a pound) yielded 191g of roasted coffee, with the rest floating away as water vapour and chaff. Given what I paid for the raw coffee, that works out to about $16 a pound for the finished product, plus the energy expense and my time. Since that’s about par with what I would pay for locally roasted beans, I’m definitely not in it to save money!
If you get “serious” about it, consider buying 10lbs at a time at a place like Green Beanery (http://www.greenbeanery.ca/bean/home.php) right in TO. You can get something like Ethiopian Sidamo GR2 Organic Fair Trade Certified @ 8.60/lb, for a finished price of only $10.22/lb, and that is for organic fair trade. Even very premium ones are only 10-12/lb normally. Green keep a long time if stored even remotely sensibly.
Paul pre-empted me! Greenbeanery is a fine choice although their list contains more items than they have in stock. They also have a good technician at the King St. location.
A new Canadian source has shown up at http://www.greencoffeebuyingclub.com The vendor has a Costa Rica St. Helena that is getting a good reception, at just over $5/lb delivered.