Coffee Roasting

When I retired about ten years ago, I decided I would like to start a new hobby. A close friend of mine's son was roasting his own coffee at the time. I ended up spending a couple of hours discussing coffee roasting with him. My next step was to do some research on coffee roasting – how practical is it, how expensive is it and how time consuming is it. After about a week of research and reading I decided I would like to try my hand at roasting some coffee.

I decided to purchase the green coffee beans from a home coffee roasting specialty store Sweet Maria’s. I also purchased a Behmor 1600 Plus coffee roaster. One of the decisions I had to make was where should I roast the coffee. Roasting coffee does produce some smoke and I would not recommend using a coffee roaster inside your home. I had a table in the garage and that seemed to be the ideal location. After purchasing a small kitchen scale I was ready to roast my first batch of coffee.

When I first started roasting coffee I kept a detailed log of each batch that I roasted. I included country of origin, size of batch, roasting information, and the desired type of roast. I was new to coffee roasting and wasn’t even sure what type of a coffee roast both my wife and I would like. Should it be a light roast, a medium roast, a dark roast or even an espresso roast? I roasted a lot of coffee from different coffee growing regions and different roast types to determine what Nancy and I liked the best. Every time I roasted a new batch of coffee, Nancy knew I was going to ask her to give it a grade.

This process of discovery took a couple of months before I had a fairly good idea of which coffee growing regions we liked and what type of a roast we preferred. Roasting coffee is not hard, but it does take time and you have to develop your own roasting profile. I now know approximately the time and settings for roasting the different green coffees that I order. Nancy and I prefer a medium to medium-dark roast depending on the origin of the coffee that is roasted.

For a good cup of coffee, roasting the coffee is only the first step, grinding and brewing your coffee is just as important. One of the accessories I purchased when I decided to start this new hobby was a good burr coffee grinder. It was a little on the expensive side, but the quality of the grinder and the consistency of the grind in the ground coffee has made it worth the price we paid.

We use the pour over method for brewing our cup of coffee. It brings out the coffee's natural flavors and enhances the coffee’s natural aromas. Just being able to smell that first cup of coffee brewing in the morning is always a good start to your day. I really look forward to that first cup of coffee in the morning.