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the coffee roasting begins

Hello, fellow adventurers. Ready to sacrifice your hot-air popcorn popper in the name of science? Not to mention a guaranteed daily ahhhhhhhhhhhh?

Read on, for the tale of the Yauco Selecto and how to roast your own coffee

It all started off innocently enough. It always does. We had stopped off in Portsmouth to see the Albacore. No, I'm not talking tuna. I mean the submarine that's parked there. Hey, here's the deal. Don't eat beans before the sub tour. Ok?

Hungry and thirsty and road-drowsy as ever, we stopped at the local deli for a quick lunch before the tour. Perusing an issue of Coffee Quarterly in search of an ad for the Nissan French press coffeemaker, I became intrigued by an ad for a self-published pamphlet. The topic: how to roast your own coffee.

People are roasting their own coffee! Burning it, too, no doubt. Naturally I didn't send away for this ten-dollar boondoggle. Maybe there was even a video involved. Eeek! Heck, I didn't even know if our coffee grinder still worked. Maybe we had tossed it when we last moved.

So I did the next best thing. I searched for 'french press' on the internet. I thought I might get into this whole improved coffee thing gradually. Naturally this turned up a huge panoply of information sources.

And the facts! I had never expected facts this big.

Coffee is the largest commercial crop. How branded coffees lowered the quality of the coffee we drink in the 1940s. How to brew coffee. And smaller bits of information too, including many opportunities to buy coffee, including a French press.

Actually, I didn't buy the French press. I got it free (FREE!) when I purchased 2 pounds of assorted dessert coffee packets. Isn't it amazing how that works? Sadly, the french press was rather small, producing only 300 milliliters of coffee at a time.

Still, I'll have to say this. It was the best cup of coffee I had ever had.

I didn't use the dessert coffees which came with the French press, though. I still had a nice mixture of roasted beans from my last visit to the Bohemian Coffee Roaster (located on Main Street in Brunswick, Maine), which oddly enough closes at 4 in the afternoon. Not very bohemian if you ask me, but I used the beans, a mixture of dark french roast, but also some lighter beans.

I called my pals at the Bohemian. Reasoning that they must have green coffee in order to roast it. I asked... Did they by any chance have green coffee beans? Well, yes. How much are we talking about? Oh, yes, just a pound or two, we might arrange that. You'd have to talk to the boss. Do you have a coffee roaster? Yes, I do. In theory, anyway. Ha ha ha, well come on in.

This posed a problem. I never like to ask for the proprietor, even in cases such as this one, where the proprietor may be very attractive. How then to obtain green beans? The best way is in bulk. Soon I was contemplating the unfortunate influence of product branding. It always influences us to take the easy way out. Not to put it all together ourselves when it's so easy. The solution was obvious. Start a web business selling green coffee and roasting kits. It would have a URL of www.greencaffeine.com or maybe www.greencoffee.com ! Almost as soon as I got to a computer I was able to explain my idea to the proprietor of Praiswater Coffee Roasters, who answered the phone. No, most people who called already had an idea of what they wanted. A kit didn't seem practical. And only about 12 people had called. Sure, he had green coffee. Would I like to try Yauco Selecto? Somewhere there is an excellent book on how to grind and roast your own coffee. You may even find excerpts in one of the references at the end of this story.

However, in case you do not have an unlimited amount of time to unlock the mystery and wonder of the worldwide trade in the coffee berry, I have included a brief sketch of my own experience, below. I'm sure there are many other fine ways to make excellent coffee, but this is the best I have ever encountered.

How to roast your own coffee

Green beans stay fresh for a year or even two. Roasted beans are as fresh as can be, for two or three days.

Start your water boiling. When the water has boiled, let it begin cooling.

If you have a smoke alarm, or lack a fan in the kitchen, it may be wiser to take your roasting activities outside!

Fire up the right kind of hot air popper, the kind that has heat come in from holes in the sides, not the bottom. This is to decrease fire danger.

Pour the green coffee in until it stops swirling around. (It will start again in a second or two, when it dries out).

While you're waiting for the first crackle of the beans, coffee bean chaff will fly out of the popper. Aren't you glad you're outside?

Wait for the first crackle of the beans. A minute or so later, listen for the second crackling.

Start timing from the beginning of the second crackle. You will be roasting from 1 to 3 minutes after this, depending on how well roasted you like your coffee! Keep an eye on the color of the beans.

Pour the hot roasted coffee beans into your colander or seive. Swirl it around in front of the fan to cool it down, otherwise it keeps cooking and will just taste baked. Some people say you could spray a little water on it at this point, but Bill at www.greencoffee.com was extremely dubious. Why should you pay attention to what Bill says? Well, for one thing, he has roasted over 200 pounds of coffee in his hot air popcorn popper. And that was even before he had the Kona Coast plantation. When he was a grower he roasted a lot more than that, for all the plantations around, and he didn't use the hot-air popper for that. Funny how you can get started doing something, and then it leads to something else.

Grind the coffee, put it in the French press.

Pour in the water, which by this time has cooled to 203 or 204 degrees, let it steep for 5 minutes or 7 minutes or more. Whatever. Just as with the roasting, we're not talking rocket science.

After waiting for the coffee to brew, push in the plunger on the French press.

Pour yourself a cup.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

 

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I think you should try it. The plastic cover to the popcorn popper hardly melted at all.

Green coffee beans www.greencoffee.com (domain now for sale!)

Yauco Selecto (no longer at www.yscoffee.com )

Home coffee roasting www2.lucidcafe.com/lucidcafe/homeroast.html

The world of Coffee www.nwlink.com/~donclark/java/world.html

Here are some other coffee links:

SweetMarias.com (home coffee roasting supplies)

Montana Coffee Traders
Porto Rico Importing Company
gocoffee.com
Specialty Coffee Institute
coffeeworks.com (a shop in Sacramento)
www.toddyproducts.com (cold brewed coffee maker)
Delightful Deliveries

 

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