Moscow Cafe Crawl

Tonight, my wife and I tried roasting coffee at home for the first time. We had a blast! She documented the excursion on her blog. Here it is in full.

For years now, Hubby and I have wanted to try roasting our own coffee from raw beans. The flavor from fresh-roasted coffee is always quite a bit better, not to mention it would be a fun, unique experience. Today Hubby picked up some green coffee beans from Bucer’s Coffee Pub where his friend is the manager and does the roasting. These beans, from Ethiopia, are said to have quite a bright flavor and the beans are on the small side.

We had heard of people roasting coffee at home in a popcorn popper. We also had heard of doing it in a pan but had been warned that it would stink up the house. For this reason we dug out one of the camping pans and used the barbecue out back.

Since it was really chilly outside, we went ahead and put the lid on, attempting to get the temperature up to 400 degrees F, which we had been told was about the right temperature to roast the beans.

I stirred the beans every few minutes. Hubby took his turn and we tried to keep them evenly spread out on the bottom of the pan.

To my surprise, after about ten minutes, the beans began to turn color. I’m not sure why I hadn’t really expected it to work but I was happily wrong.

After 25 minutes, the beans had turned dark brown like we were used to with coffee. We’d also heard them pop and crackle, what Hubby calls the “first crack”. A few minutes later the “second crack” sounded like a more subdued version of the first and Hubby declared them to be finished.

We poured them immediately into a wire colander to cool them. To our surprise, the chaff blew off easily and Hubby swirled the beans around for about five minutes to cool them off.

Back inside when the beans felt cool to the touch, we measured out enough beans for a full French Press pot.

Hubby’s new burr grinder, a present to himself with the money from his award, was put to work and we made a pot of coffee.

Then the final test… It tasted pretty good!! To our extreme surprise it made a smooth, bright, unusual tasting cup of coffee. Partly the blend, partly maybe a tad underdone, but the taste was not bad at all, and definitely good for a first attempt. The experiment has been dubbed a success.

From green coffee to a fully prepared cup in 35 minutes, this was the freshest coffee it’s possible to have. I can’t say that my unsophisticated palette can really tell the difference; in a blind taste test, I doubt I could pick it out. But it was definitely a very good cup of coffee, I’ll give it that. I would like to try the technique again, hopefully with more confidence in the future.

Filed under: Home Brew on June 11th, 2008