It is amazing how much a coffee drinker can spend on coffee beans. So much money for such an ephemeral product. The very roasting of coffee beans not only develops the flavors we are looking for, but also starts the irreversible oxidation process that will slowly destroy those flavors. Match its short-lived nature with the quest for unusual beans and you've guaranteed that you are paying a lot for your beans, I might add, that are well on their way past their prime.
So, is it impossible to drink great coffee and have it completely fresh? Not at all. I started roasting my own coffee about six years ago. Now, I wonder how I ever got along all the years before, wandering an overcooked and rancid dessert, and nary a great drop to drink.
Roasting coffee only requires two things: green coffee beans and a proper heating mechanism. Green coffee beans are easy to get and more importantly, are significantly cheaper than store-bought, pre-roasted beans. At nicer coffee boutiques, one can pay $12, 14, or more for standard fare, and markedly more for exotica. What about a pound of Java Monsooned Arabica, a premium coffee stored through the monsoon season, transforming it to an exotic coffee of distinction, with low-acidity, serious funk, and a peppery/spiciness? What about $4.20? That's how much my supplier of choice, Sweet Maria's, is charging for this. And it is significantly less in volume, namely $3.73 a pound when buying ten pounds. Even if you were lucky enough to find this gem at your local roaster, would they roast it for you as, say, city plus and french roast? Not on your life. When roasting at home, you make the call.
Now, how to roast them? You can use anything from an convection oven to a wok or a digitally controlled coffee roaster. I started out with dedicated coffee roasters, first the Cafe Rosto. It did not serve me so well. I couldn't get a decent dark roast out of it. I had read that Cafe Rostos were really sensitive to the quality of your electricity, but getting the same results in Ohio that I did in Massachusetts made me suspect that it wasn't the electricity. So, I tried another roaster. The iRoast 2. Ah, what a temptress. Programmable heat/time curves. Mmmmm. Geek machine. Unfortunately, it proved to be delicate (the lid shattered after a gentle fall to the counter) and shortly after I replaced the lid, the iRoast simply stopped roasting coffee.
Now, the word "irony" comes from the Greek for "simulated ignorance". I like to think of it more as hysterical serendipity. So, as mentioned above, the iRoast decided to stop roasting and panic reigned supreme here at Rancho Deluxe. The thought of drinking something barbaric rather than freshly roasted whim of the day was about unbearable (at any time, I have around eight varieties of green coffee around, with two of them usually being oddball or exotic). Three days after the iRoast became a multi-hundred dollar paperweight, a plain-wrapper, generic brown box arrived in the mail. Inside was a West Bend Poppery II, the quintessential air popcorn popper and legendary homebrew coffee roaster. Irony?
It had come as a gift from my friend Joey B. Long had been the years that I had mocked him and his three dollar, garage-sale purchased, low-tech coffee roasters. And soon, I was to find out how wrong I was. Not only was the roaster timely, it is best coffee roaster I have ever had. The serendipity part? Joey had known nothing of my coffee quandry; it was just a well-timed gift.
More on coffee in an upcoming post, but the moral of the story is this: three dollar air poppers rock!
