The answer to each of these questions is fairly straightforward. If you have the wherewithal to do it, and you'd be happy enough with the outcome, the answer is yes, except probably for the appendectomy. There are growing number of places that sell green unroasted coffee for those who want to roast it themselves at home, and a few options on the market for home coffee roasting machines.
If you're considering taking up the hobby—or picking up a home coffee roaster as a holiday gift for someone you love, it's worth making an informed decision. Just because you can roast your own coffee at home, does that mean you should? I suppose the question at hand is ultimately, "Is coffee roasting more like knitting or appendectomies? At its most basic, roasting coffee is heating it until it turns brown.
The thing is, those also make great instructions on how to take a beautiful prime-grade ribeye steak and turn it into cardboard, so you'll need to know more than that. A lot of us were eating cardboardy steaks back in the 70's and 80's when well-done was more the norm and coffee's been roasted for centuries with similar finesse. With most foods, cooking with heat was first about making it more digestible before it was about more palatable.
With roasting coffee, it's fundamentally about making it brewable, since brewing green coffee doesn't produce anything anyone really wants. A perfect roast is ultimately about the balance between flavors in the green coffee and those that develop during roasting.
Historically, roasting was done over an open flame in some sort of a pan, with some method of stirring to try to encourage evenness in the process. Mechanized roasting combined those two elements by putting the coffee in a metal contraption that you'd turn over the flame like a rotisserie. Different roasting machines performed the job in different ways, and as fossil fuel-burning roasters came into regular use, you saw a divergence in roasting dynamics depending on the tastes of your market.
American-built roasters were all about speed, which resulted in a more generic coffee flavor profile. Italian roasters were about slow, which maximized extractability while reducing burnt flavors, yielding roasted beans that were suited for the short brew-times involved in making espresso.
German roasters, on the other hand, tended to be the most over-built and heavy, sort of like a massive cast-iron skillet for coffee roasting. Not coincidentally, Germany has historically enjoyed a higher quality coffee profile, developing what may be collectively the most picky coffee palates in the world.
German-build roasters tend to be the most desired, and you can find many year-old German-built roasters still in use today. In essence, roasting coffee is a bit like popping popcorn, baking bread, and a little like grilling a steak.
You might not have even known that home roasting is a thing, but it totally is. Freshly roasted coffee can be incredibly subtle. Depending on the bean, you can pick out flavors like:. The problem is, most of the subtlety only lasts a week or so because the oils and compounds in the roasted beans degrade quickly.
A Literature Review on Coffee Staling. I got into home coffee roasting out of necessity. They literally cannot be purchased commercially. If you want great coffee around here, you have to make it yourself.
Lucky for me, my friend Erin hi Erin! Turn the fan on, and stand back as the chaff blows away. Shake the colander a few times just to make sure everything is out. Search Search. Learn from Us. Real coffee drinkers roast their own beans.
Here's how you can do it yourself. Twitter Icon. Things went pretty well at first. I could totally do this on a regular basis, I thought. Heat: Using medium heat, begin stirring as your pan heats up. Brew: And be happy you went through all that work. Or not. Filed to: Food and Drink. Read this next. By: Ebony Roberts. By: Grayson Haver Currin. Step 2. Round up the equipment. Step 3. Start roasting. Step 4. Pull them out once they're dark enough. Step 5. Cool beans. Step 6. Let them breathe, then start the brew.
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