Home roasted coffee

Well, it's better than I expected, despite the very fast and hot roast. Freshness also brought problems adjusting the grind and tamp for a good extraction, and I still haven't really figured them out with a good repeatability. But overall I find home roasting coffee turning into an interesting hobby, the coffee already is pretty much on par with commercial beans. And as green coffee can be stored for weeks, even months, the possibility to have a variety of different coffees is very tempting. Roast a batch in the morning, and you have a fresh roast of new blend coffee the next morning, but you're not stuck with gulping tens of cups of it in a few days. Just roast another small batch of another coffee and you're all set again.

It's very difficult to get a consitent roast, as it happens extremely fast. Hopefully the arriving winter will lower the temperatures so I can get a good, slow roast. The nights are already below freezing in the northern Finland, so it shouldn't take too long for the cold to get here.

Coffee roasting

Oh well, now I've fallen deep enough into the coffee world and I've roasted my first batch of coffee. I ordered a small selection of ready made blends for both espresso and french press from Sweet Maria's and the beans arrived in a week and a half. My starter's roasting setup is very simple at the moment, a simple hot air popcorn popper, a bowl, a colander and a small colander for moving the beans while cooling.

This popper is a very fast roaster, I guess it's running a bit too hot even. It's a bit loud, so I'm not yet 100% if I've stopped after the first crack or deep into the second crack. And the roasting is a bit uneven, the beans circluate around and the center stays relatively cool until the audible cracks start. But despite reaching a very dark roast in just around 3 minutes, the beans themselves seem very evenly roasted, as you can see in the cross section picture. The one on the left is my first batch, and the bean on the right is a commercially roasted coffee bean, Robert's Coffee Espresso Habanero, somewhere around French roast.
I also roasted a batch of decaf espresso "Donkey" blend to slightly lighter shade than the "Monkey" blend, in the neighbourhood of Full City and Vienna roasts.

Tomorrow the beans have rested and degassed hopefully enough so I can try them out both in the morning and in the afternoon to see how the flavor develops and if the quick roast is doing something to the taste and crema.

To enhance the roast I think I should somehow agitate the beans during roasting. But that would mean lots of flying chaf everywhere, unless I manage to build some kind of a ventilation tube with a fan to suck the chaf and smoke out the balcony windows. And slowing down the roast would probably be a good idea as well, but first I need a trustworthy thermometer to figure out how hot the thing is now.