I wrote an article on home coffee roasting for Tastebud last night. I’m a big fan of home roasting, and have been explaining it to a bunch of folks over the past couple of months. I thought it was worth a write up, and might be interesting to you techie folks. http://tastebudchicago.com/blog/roast-your-own-coffee/
I also added a couple of my roast notes. I have a stack of index cards I need to enter into the site, a bunch of wines, cheeses, and coffees. The teeny coffee list is at http://tastebudchicago.com/coffees/.
If you like coffee, and have a DIY sort of ethic, coffee roasting is probably right up your alley. Get up on it.
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I’m 30!
So, expect a lot more mature blogging now, instead of all this hot open source stuff I’ve been tossing out at you. Now that I’m an old man, I’m pretty sure I’ll be writing Java or C#, kicking back with my enterprise friends, chatting about the power of waterfall.
So long 20’s, I barely knew you.
Found this link (http://www.afactor.net/kitchen/coffee/kaffeeKantate.html) to a cantata written by JS Bach for performance in a coffee house via this violin.com blog entry. While you’re there, check out this mp3 of Scottish style fiddle.
I’ve been a fan of Intelligentsia coffee for about two years now. I like the fact that they enjoy what they do, it clearly comes through in the product. About six months ago, they started to offer unroasted beans on their site. I didn’t realize that it was possible to roast at home. Finally, two weeks ago, I bought Home Coffee Roasting : Romance and Revival from the book store.
Here’s the thing: you roast the beans in a stovetop popcorn popper. The book recommends Sweet Maria’s for beans and equipment. After ~ $60 (including shipping) I had a whirley popcorn popper, a candy thermometer, and 8 little bags of various green coffees. I also signed up on the Sweet Maria’s discussion list. It has a good amount of traffic, it’s been interesting reading.
I’ve now roasted a total of three times. The first turned out pretty poor. Way too little roast. It was interesting, but needed just a touch more roast to really be considered good coffee. The next two turned out really well. I’ve roasted two varieties of coffee, one from Nigeria and one from Rwanda. The Nigerian had a heavy earthy taste to it that I liked. I think if I would have roasted for a bit longer it would have turned out great. The Rwandan is very good. Both times it roasted to a nice oily deep roast. Flavor wise, it’s pretty plain. I’m going to try and tone the darkness down a bit on the next roast to try and let the varietal flavor come out a bit more. I’m not sure if the dark is killing something else in the bean. We shall see.
I was surprised at how quickly I picked up the techniques, never having seen anyone roast before. It’s really not that difficult. However, it is pretty messy. I did all three roasts on the side burner of our gas grill out back. The coffee smokes pretty heavily, and creates a lot of chaffe.
I need a better way to track information about the roasts, so I can recreate successful ones with some sort of accuracy. For now, I’m taking notes on index cards for each roast. It’s not a bad system, but the nerd in me wants to get computers involved. I’m still not entirely sure how, or where, but computers and or robots will get involved at some point.
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