During a recent discussion after Linsey's small appliance post, somebody mentioned DIY coffee roasting in a popcorn popper. As a fanatical coffee lover and someone always on the lookout for cheap ways to pull off the gourmet experience at home, I had to go digging for more home roasting info. Here's what I found out.

Getting Started

  • As long as your popper vents from the side and not the bottom, it should be fine to experiment with when roasting your own green beans at home. Sweet Maria's has some simple directions and a visual guide of the different stages of coffee roasting. This link also has a simple visual breakdown of how to try this at home with your own popcorn popper.
  • Green coffee beans stay fresh for quite some time, providing a long term shelf life for those interested in greater financial returns for their bulk buying efforts.
  • Looking to branch out while still keeping it cheap? This link has information on how to roast your own beans in the oven, over the campfire, or on the grill.
  • Getting excited and wanting to take it to the next level? Consider creating your own flavor options. While researching this piece, I found three general ways this can be done: By putting flavoring elements in with the actual roasted beans while they are sealed in a jar, by putting in finer ground elements or extracts into the actual coffee grinds as they are run through the press or brewing filter, or by adding a simple flavor shot or other liquid ingredient to the actual cup of hot coffee.

Things You Need to Know

  • The actual process is far from neat. Two things I read about over and over again were the smoke factor and the chaff. The actual roasting process can apparently produce a fair amount of smoke, making it advisable to try this in either a well ventilated kitchen or outdoors entirely. The chaff is the light, delicate and tedious skin that separates from the coffee bean during the roasting process. Commercial style roasters sized for home use (which you can certainly purchase if you find this is something you want to embrace enough to indulge in higher tech equipment) have filters or catching traps for the chaff, making it less of a mess to clean up afterward. But if you want to keep it cheap and stick with the popcorn popper option, moving the entire operation to the back deck should certainly do the trick.
  • The amount of money you will be able to save is directly tied to price you are able find on the raw beans, and how that price compares to the pre-roasted you also have access to. Three places I found online are Sweet Marias, Amazon and Brew Organic. They also each sell small coffee bags, making this a great idea for an out of the ordinary homemade Christmas gift idea.
  • Another tip I picked up is that you will likely want to cool down the beans as quickly as possible between the roasting process and the storing of the finished beans in an airtight container such as a canning jar. Some people do this by pouring them into a deep sided baking dish to spread them out, or by transferring from one sieve to another until the temperature reduces.

Since this idea is new to me, I'll be continuing to search for new information, books to review, and equipment to test drive. For the time being though, I was just so excited about the possibilities I wanted you all to have the information as soon as I could provide it. Times are tight, and us coffee hounds have to stick together. Any of you with further information or flavoring recipes, please join in the conversation below.