Unroasted Green CoffeeSo as my recent blog entry indicated, I've become something of a specialty coffee fanatic lately.
Well, recently I decided to take the leap from buying roasted beans to buying green beans and roasting them at home myself. Why would I do this?
1) Freshness. Beans start to decay in quality within 24 hours of roasting. Roasting your own beans thus gives you the maximum control over timing for freshness.
2) Flexibility. Roasting your own allows you to roast small quantities of beans at a time. If you feel like roasting more, depending on your device, this can be pretty easy. Small quantities ties into freshness - if you never roast more than 3 or 4 days worth of coffee at a time, you're unlikely to lose much on the flavor end of things. Another thing here is that you can switch between coffees quickly and easily because green coffee stores so well.
3) The Process and Ritual. Simply put, I find it geeky cool to watch green coffee go through the chemical reactions in roasting which transform it into something to brew 4 or more hours later. I really enjoy watching the beans slowly change color and expand. When I later grind and brew the beans there's an integration of process tantamount to ritual which makes me feel more connected to the coffee than I otherwise do. The only thing left to do is to grow and pick it myself. Well, don't think I haven't considered it, but its pretty hard to do properly outside of tropical climes.
4) The COST! Green coffee beans are, on average, half the price of roasted coffee. This can really add up fast. What's more, my roasting unit, the West End Poppery, cost me about $40 on ebay. The other components I am using, two colandors, a wooden spoon, an empty soup can, a fan, a spray bottle, and a small kitchen scale, cost me even less than that.
5) Time. Of course it takes longer to roast coffee than to get it preroasted, but the time investment is minimal really. It takes me under 10 minutes to do each batch, making doing it every three days or so, or at minimum, on the weekends, very practical, especially in light of the benefit.
So how come a lot more people don't do this?
Socialization. It wasn't more than 100 years ago that home roasting was extremely common. It took mass production of coffee and a concentrated advertising effort by mass producers to dissuade the public from roasting their own.
Also, I think a lot of people think its harder than it really is. Listen folks, if *I* can do it, anyone can. I'm the least handy, practical guy around. Really, you can't fuck this up too bad.
I highly recommend Ken Davids book on this subject Home Coffee Roasting: Romance and Revival. Below are pictures of the transformation the green coffee pictured above goes through during the roasting process, from unroasted to uberdark oilly roast. (I realize the pic is cutoff, click on it for full view).
