Roast Your Own Coffee, Dammit!
Take your money away from Starbucks, Dunkin and every other coffee purveyor
I was sick of spending too much money on coffee beans from Starbucks. Sure, it was supposed to be the best - thought always tasted a bit burnt to me.
But it was something like $10 per 12-ounce bag. That's $15 a pound!
My wife did the research and found Sweet Maria’s (sweetmarias.com), selling green beans out of California along with instructions on roasting them in a popcorn popper. The unroasted beans cost something like $5 per pound. Plus electricity.
The WeGoLocal Way to Roast
After burning out two popcorn poppers, my wife got the brilliant idea of roasting using a propane Weber grill.
We bought it as an anniversary gift to each other, and I’ve been roasting our own ever since. Twelve minutes of propane burning at 400 degrees isn't very expensive, really.
The simple process
All you need is a metal vegetable steamer, which you can find for $5, probably. To cool the roasted beans, you’ll also need two metal colanders. Those might be $10. (We got ours at an estate sale, I believe.)
The green beans are spread out in a quarter -inch layer and placed directly on the grill, when the oven is at 400-500 degrees.
They stay there for 8 minutes.
At 8 minutes I wear a pair of hot mitts and pour the roasted beans into a colander. You should be able to hear the “first crack” of the beans as they begin to reach roastiness, level one.
Second stage roasting
Pour the beans back into the vegetable steamer and mix slightly with your finger.
(Don't forget those hot mitts!)
Roast for another 3 minutes or so until they're done. Use your nose to smell for doneness and watch for most of the beans to get dark.
That may be up to 5 minutes or more, but be careful. When your nose catches a whiff of ash, you’ve waited too long. That batch goes to the compost heap (or trash can, if you don't compost).
Pour the roasted beans from one colander to the other until the batch stops smoking. Chaff from the beans will float away with any kind of breeze.
Let the beans aerate by resisting the urge to grind some immediately. The 24-hour process of sitting around doing nothing is called “off-gassing,” which sounds appropriate.
We now order from other online retailers of green beans, such as Burman Coffee Traders in Madison, Wisconsin (burmancoffee.com) and Dean’s Beans (deansbeans.com), now a cooperative.
Fair trade, organic, site-specific coffee beans are available for around $5/pound, to start. Jamaican Blue Mountain and other rare beans cost more, of course - but significantly less than their pre-roasted competitors.
Let us know in the comments how much less that is than the coffee you buy now.
When you realize how much you would save, start roasting your own coffee, dammit!