A Beginner's Guide To Coffee Roasting At Home

You've been curious about what it takes to bake, toast, or roast your own coffee and how to get started. Well stick around because we're going to answer those questions and much more in this video. Why roast your own coffee with so many commercial roasters putting out tasty offerings? Could be you live on a small island where there are no specialty roasters and it's expensive or difficult to get coffee shipped in. Could be coffee subscriptions just don't seem to synchronize up with your usage patterns leaving you out of coffee with an hour-long drive or more around trip to replenish. Perhaps you're convinced you could do it better than those commercial roasters. Maybe you're just looking for a deeper connection with your coffee or simply find the three-time savings of buying green compelling or maybe it's none of the above. You've mastered the sourdough loaf and now you're looking for your next challenge. Whatever the case I'm here to tell you roasting coffee can be fun and rewarding and it's easier and less expensive than you probably thought. Now you won't be giving commercial roasters a run for their business anytime soon but you will be roasting drinkable coffee in no time and impressing your friends along the way. Wait what? You roast your own coffee? Roasting on the most basic level could be accomplished by spreading raw green across a pan and baking it in the oven, browning it in a skillet, roasting it in a colander over a heat gun or in the barbecue. But of all the free or cheap ways you can get started a popcorn popper like this for $25 is arguably the easiest most hands-off approach. Load the beans switch it on and get ready to cut the power and dump out that roasted coffee as soon as the color looks good. Out of the box though the popcorn popper offers little to no controls over important variables such as temperature and airflow and they send chaff flying everywhere. A much better option and for not much more money is the popper from Sweet Maria's. For less than $90 you now have a popcorn maker with heat and fan speeds decoupled allowing you to make adjustments on the fly as well as a chaff collector probably the most underrated feature of this unit. Now if it seems like something you'll stick with and you're the type to go all in there are better and still affordable options to consider. For between two and three hundred dollars you can score yourself a fresh roast 540 or an 800. Like the popper these are fluid bed roasters using convection to heat the beans but they offer a higher capacity and more control as well as having a nice viewing window to watch the roast as it develops. For $75 you could start roasting with this fancy skillet called the hive roaster. Instead of using a spatula to agitate the beans you play it like a percussion instrument. Type in coffee roaster on amazon and you'll see there are numerous drum roaster options available for under a couple hundred dollars that you can use with a gas burner to roast coffee inside. You can either hook up a small dc motor to it or crank by hand. Stretch a little more and you can get into something like the be more which not only gives you the option to roast manually but also pre-programmed profiles. Another nice feature is the exhaust fan. If your roasting chamber is not properly ventilated smoke build-up inside will have the same effect on the coffee that a campfire has on your clothes. There are of course several options on the market and new ones popping up every day so be sure to do your research both manufacturers websites as well as on the various roasting forums online before pulling the trigger. At this point in your roasting journey the choice will most likely come down to your budget and how much coffee you need roasted each time. On that note be warned roaster manufacturers like fishermen tend to exaggerate. They'll say you can roast this much but as a rule of thumb assume a capacity that's 20 to 30 percent below stated value. Popcorn makers are the most restricted with maximum capacity ranging from about 50 to 70 grams. Fresh roasts can roast between 140 to 250 be more and genie cafe and caldi in the neighborhood of 250 to 350. Also keep in mind that these numbers refer to the weight of the green coffee going in. By the time you've finished roasting the seeds it will have lost between 12 to 14 percent of its weight if you drop light 15 to 17 of medium and 18 to 21 if dark. Do some quick math and consider the coffee consumption within your household. How often will you have the time needed to roast? Are you good with knocking out a few roast sessions or you want it all in one go? The basics of roasting is this you apply heat to the coffee seeds as fast and as evenly as you can moving them through three phases of drying browning and development while avoiding roast defects along the way. The following are some of the terms to be familiar with. Charging a roaster is to load it with green coffee. Charged temperature is the start or the preheat temperature. Batch size is the amount of green coffee being loaded. The drying phase is the first third of the roast that's spent evaporating the moisture inside the beans to make way for the browning phase which is the middle third of the roast where the more interesting and flavorful caramelization and maillard reactions responsible for a lot of the aromas present in roasted coffee begin to get underway. First crack is the course of beans bursting at their seams to release the buildup of water vapor they can no longer contain. It's sort of like cracking your knuckles all at once. Second crack is a similar event but this time it's the buildup of CO2 that the beans can no longer hold and now with the cell structure of the beans further weakened and more brittle than before the chorus is softer the sound is more akin to snapping of twigs. Development phase is that last third of the roast which starts with the onset of first crack and ends when you conclude the roast. Dropping the coffee means ending the roast by either literally dropping the coffee out of the roasting chamber and into a cooling tray or in some roasters by turning off the heat and cranking up the fan to cool the coffee inside the chamber. Similar to how a steak continues to cook a little bit longer after it's been removed from the grill if you don't actively cool the coffee after it's done roasting it will keep coasting. Ideally you bring the coffee down to body temperature in as little as four to six minutes to prevent it coasting. Drop temperature is that temperature at which you stop the roast. Fluid bed roasters transfer heat fast and efficiently and as such roast times can end up being as short as four to six minutes typically finishing in under nine. That long end happens to be on the short end for drum roasters which transfer heat slower. A typical 10 minute roast in a drum might progress as follows. Paling at three minutes, yellowing at four, browning at five, first crack at eight, and about two minutes of development dropping at ten. Once you sort out the roaster that's right for you right now it's time to start shopping for coffee to roast. You'll find green coffee available across the internet but be mindful that quality and standards for what's fresh and good runs the gamut and some of what's being sold to the consumer market may be what the commercial market has rejected. Coffee starts to fade no matter how carefully stored within six months of harvest. The most transparent suppliers will list the arrival date of the coffee. If you're not seeing that date posted be wary and at least ask for more information. Green coffee defects such as insect infestation, large variation in size, or high concentration of fractured beans are relatively easy to spot. Others such as a high number of unripe seeds referred to as Quakers are more difficult to identify and usually only visible in the roasted coffee where they show up as noticeably lighter than the rest of the batch. Poor quality green coffee will result in lackluster roasted coffee and in some cases even offensive tasting. Beans of different sizes and various states of fracture will roast at different rates leaving you to play the over-under. Beans with visible infestation will taste earthy and moldy. Sweet Maria's has been in the green coffee business for more than 25 years and they have been publishing educational content for all of that time. Their online coffee library and YouTube channel are a treasure trove for budding roasters learning the ropes. Their green coffee listings include a wealth of information about the coffee on offer, its producer, and the region it comes from. They share their cupping scores for each coffee, their roasting recommendations, and an array of descriptors that make it easy for you to select the coffees that align most with your preferred brew method and taste preferences. The best you can hope for when roasting coffee is to highlight the intrinsic qualities of the seeds. If it's an earthy low acid coffee from Brazil or Southeast Asia there's literally nothing you can do in the roast to conjure up bright floral forward flavors of fruit bombs. These attributes are a product of the terroir that is the climate, soil, and elevation they were grown as well as a processing method used at the plant. Was it wet, dry, honey pulp natural, or wet hold processed? You can take the same coffee and process it five different ways and each will result in a wildly different cup. In addition to those mentioned there are other experimental processing methods being explored in recent years. If you're wondering which origins to get started with generally speaking coffee from the Americas tend to offer bright fruit and floral flavors with light to medium body and a pleasing acidity while the coffees from Brazil typically feature chocolatey and nutty flavors and muted acidity. If you're on the hunt for juicy and jammy coffees as well as some funky ones East Africa would be a good place to start. On the other hand if you have a thing for heavy body and earthy aromas check out Southeast Asia and the Pacific. It's good to have a plan. Are you focused on preserving origin characteristics in the coffee or do you want to introduce more of the roast flavors? Is it a high elevation washed coffee or a low elevation natural? While the first can take high preheats and a lot of gas out of the gate the second generally fares better with the lower and slower approach. Between the two washed or wet process coffees typically offer a cleaner cup with lighter body while natural dry process coffees tend to be more complex heavier bodied in therapy. Another important consideration is do you want the coffee to shine as a filter or as an espresso? The filter approach typically focuses on preserving acidity and origin characteristics and avoiding introducing roast flavors. The espresso approach on the other hand usually takes into consideration that it should perform equally well straight or paired with milk or non-dairy beverage. A little extra development will help to tame the acidity and add some mild roast flavors as well as body that usually improves the chemistry with milk-based drinks. If you're roasting with a popcorn maker a skillet or a barbecue you have only your sight and your smell to tell you how much heat to apply and when to cut it. Fancier roasters may come with probes and interface with software that can track and log as well as calculate derivatives and percentages that help inform how the roast is progressing. Definitely use all the available data your roaster affords but don't allow yourself to get so disconnected from the coffee or reliant on the tech that if it were to all leave you at once you wouldn't know how to manage your roast. The intro to this video is mostly tongue-in-cheek. You don't really want to bake your beans unless you fancy your coffee tasting flat, papery, and brand like. Roasts that progress too slowly, stall, or crash due to not enough heat applied at the right time to carry the roast into and out of first crack can end up tasting baked. If you're a steak lover, ever have been, or know someone that is, think of what makes a juicy steak irresistible. Seared on high heat, char marks on both sides, and a tender juicy center. Do you have that image? No, not that one, but of the juicy steak. Good. Don't roast your coffee how you grill your steaks. Unless you enjoy smoky cups, you don't want to blacken your coffee. The two defects related to this are tipping and scorching. Tipping happens when the tips or the ends of the beans are roasting faster than the middle, usually because you've applied too much heat too fast. Scorching happens when the drum is too hot at the time you charge the roast or you've overloaded the roaster and the beans were not able to mix quickly enough, leaving the beans in contact with hot surfaces long enough to char. It's important to note that while you might have been having good success with say 250 grams of one coffee, when you switch to a different coffee that might be denser or larger, you might actually have to reduce the batch size to prevent overloading your roaster. I sincerely hope you only experience second crack once or twice, and only by accident, and attend to the roast well enough to drop it prior to this moment. Second crack is where carbonization is occurring, and by that time you've roasted all of what makes the coffee unique out. The flavors are heavy roast flavors like ash, smoke, and molasses. The oils within the beans have been driven to the surface where it will lead to rancidity once exposed to oxygen. Now might be a good time to point out that what specialty coffee roasters call dark, commodity coffee roasters like Starbucks and Pete's would refer to as medium or medium dark. Descriptors such as city, city plus, and full city are only a few degrees apart in drop temperature, and your temperatures and others will depend on everyone having that same data, as well as the same thermocouples placed in identical locations. Given all this, professional coffee roasters rely on the Actron scale, a numbering system between 25 and 95, where the color of the roast is measured by how much light reflects off the coffee. The darker the roast, the lower the number. The problem for us home roasters is that employing this system historically has required expensive optical equipment, or equally expensive SCA color calibrated swatches. Fortunately, two products recently released have made this classification system more accessible to the rest of us. This is Roast Vision from Espresso Vision, and it offers accuracy on par with solutions costing two to five times as much, and weighs far less ground coffee to obtain those measurements. But at $300, it's still best suited to the most discriminating home roaster or the one that has decided to give small batch commercial roasting a try. For everyone else, there are these $3 roasted coffee color cards from Sweet Maria's. Bean to bean, inside and out, the color can vary. So to use either of these methods, you need to grind a couple of grams of coffee first in order to get the average of the color obtained from the roast. Color is but one variable, and two roasts can share the same Actron number, but how they arrived at that number may have been through very different roasting profiles. For instance, it may have taken you with, say, a fresh roast to get there in six minutes, and them with a bean mower to get there in twice that. And you can bet that the two coffees won't taste exactly the same. Roast times are heavily dependent on factors such as the type of roaster, the batch size, preheat, batch to batch protocol, as well as how you drive the roast with the heat and the air. With that in mind, on the back of the card, along with the Actron numbers, you'll find reference temperatures and weight loss percentages. The more data points you have, the more easily you can determine similarities and differences between the two seemingly identical roasts. The following are my recommendations for those just starting out. Once you start achieving roasts that you're happy with and you wish to replicate, the key to being consistent is replicating conditions each time. If you're roasting outside and the temperatures one day are significantly higher or lower than the next, this will affect the time it takes to preheat and reach key temperatures in the roast. If you roast back to back, the temperature of the roaster on the subsequent roast will most likely be higher than the first. Dedicating the space indoors with conditioned air and making sure that the roaster is starting the second batch at the same temperature as it started the first will go a long way into improving your averages. As with any new endeavor, to increase successes and minimize failures, master the green runs before you drop into the black diamonds. In coffee roasting, this would mean while you're starting out, resist the urge to play with the knobs and the dials. Use the preset profiles if your roaster came with them. Aim for a medium roast level, somewhere between end of first crack and before second. That will ensure both good development while still preserving most of the unique character of the coffee. Erring on the side of more development rather than less is a smart play because you can always suffer through an underwhelming roast, but a grassy and vegetable one will be insufferable. Decaf, barrel aged, and experimental processed coffees are examples of black diamond runs. If you've never tasted a coffee from a particular region or a processing method, it will be difficult for you to discern if what seems off in the roast is a defect, or if you just bought a coffee that you just don't vibe with. If you can source coffees that you're already familiar with, then you can qualitatively judge how your roast compares to that control. A high-grown washed Ethiopian and a low-grown natural process Brazilian can make for a tasty espresso blend, but each will require different charge temps and roast profiles to get them to the same level of development. Pre-blending and roasting the two origins at the same time together will require you to make compromises with one or both when deciding the roast profile to follow. They'll hit first crack at different times, which also means you'll be dropping them at different levels of development. They'll have more success roasting each coffee separately and then blending post-roast. In the first 24 to 36 hours, much of the volatile organic compounds or VOCs responsible for aroma and as much as 40% of the CO2 generated in the roast has escaped the beans and diffused into the atmosphere. Don't pass on the opportunity to gain a better understanding of what a particular coffee and corresponding roast profile have to offer. Make sure to do a cupping shortly after the roast completes and log your notes for future reference. While you want to cup your coffee within the first 24 hours, you will want to rest the coffee a few days or even a couple weeks before brewing. This is more crucial if brewing with the espresso method. The abundance of CO2 being expelled from the grounds gets in the way of the extraction and the high level of variability during the most active degassing makes it difficult to dial in. It's also believed that the abundance of CO2 can heighten perceived sourness, sharpness, and acidity in the coffee. Recommendations on how long to rest your coffee before brewing will vary based on the roast level and the intended brew method. While dark roasted coffee will be more porous with weakened cell wall structure to the point diffusion of aromatics and carbon dioxide is occurring like a runaway train, light roasted coffee with its cell structure tighter and significantly more intact might need a week or even two before it can come into its own and have its full flavors open up. A general rule of thumb is to go ahead and get brewing with a dark roast by day three and a medium roast by day seven, but to let your light roast chill out for a couple weeks before hitting it. Oxygen, moisture, heat, and sunlight, these are the mortal enemies of your precious coffee, so keep it away from these four elements and you'll keep it fresher longer. Since the first 24 to 36 hours is when the bulk of the degassing will occur, if you're using mason jars or ziplock bags, leave it cracked open for the first 24 hours to allow for the gas to escape. If, however, you are using a storage container with a one-way valve, you can simply toss the coffee in immediately and close it up. While coffee storage solutions that are transparent allow you to enjoy the sight of your delicious coffee, they are simultaneously diminishing the deliciousness of said coffee. The penetration of sunlight and the higher internal temperatures that result will speed up the reactions that have negative impacts on your coffee. If you are using these types of storage containers, make sure to keep them away from direct sunlight and preferably in a very dark, dark place. Planetary Designs Airscapes offers a vast array of fun colors that can help you identify your coffees without labels, should you be rotating in different varieties and blends. They use a plunger style lid with a one-way valve that enables you to minimize the amount of air present as you work through your coffee. Fellow Atmos, by contrast, has a fixed volume but employs a vacuum mechanism to remove air from the container. The trade-off for a lower oxygen environment is a negative internal pressure which accelerates the diffusion of aroma and CO2 out of your coffee. Now, for home roasters constantly forgetting to roast until it's too late, this might be for the best since you don't want to be stuck brewing coffee that hasn't properly rested. You can slow the rate at which the coffee degasses by creating a positive pressure inside the vessel it is contained within. Moreover, by flushing that canister with an inert gas such as nitrogen, argon, or carbon dioxide, in addition to increasing the atmospheric pressure inside and slowing the rate at which the natural stores of CO2 and VOCs within the coffee diffuse out, you drop the levels of oxygen below the two percent threshold that the USDA warns is the maximum allowed to prevent staling. Store claims to be the first consumer product that enables you to do exactly this, and it works with both commercial filling tanks as well as consumer bottles of CO2 such as what you get with a soda stream. The way it works is you flush the coffee with inert gas, purge, flush, purge, and flush again, then leave sealed up for long-term storage. While not very practical for frequent access, if you have something really special like a geisha you want to enjoy for as long as possible, this has in my tests extended freshness by more than a month. Another way to slow down the rate at which coffee degasses is by lowering its temperature. Vacuum sealing your coffee in food storage bags will protect it from oxygen and moisture. If you then place those bags into the freezer, you significantly lower the temperature of the coffee and thereby reduce the rate at which it degasses. This one-two punch in coffee storage all but halts aging entirely. You can also do this to store your green coffee well beyond the usual one-year recommendation. Be warned though, coffee is hygroscopic, and if measures aren't taken to ensure that it's sealed off from its environment, it will absorb moisture and food odors with it. Ensure and regularly confirm that the vacuum seal is holding. Additionally, portion the coffee appropriately to usage patterns. Best practices here would be to pre-portion single doses, but if you prefer to pull out a week's worth of coffee instead, when pulling coffee out of the freezer, give it time to acclimate before opening. Otherwise, the ambient moisture present will rapidly condense on the cold beans. One last note on freezer storage. Since freezing coffee effectively slows or even suspends aging, you'll want to allow your roasted coffee to adequately rest to its peak freshness window before freezing so that it's immediately ready to brew when you remove it from the freezer. There's so much material to cover on the subject of home roasting, one video simply isn't enough space to do it in. If you enjoyed this video and want to see more home roasting content, leave a comment below letting us know what to cover next. At a minimum, we hope we helped you answer the question, should I try home roasting? Will you? Do you already? Tell us in the comment section below. Until next time, happy brewing and roasting!