Why I Roast My Own
Why I Roast My Own
And How You Can Roast Your Own, Too
About five years ago, I decided to try roasting my own coffee beans at home, and I haven’t stopped. Despite my rustic and imprecise method, I find most of what I roast is delicious and at least comparable, if not preferable, to what I can buy in the greater New York area, where I live. The good friends I serve it to, several of whom work in food and wine and are opinionated about coffee, agree. Even my wife relishes the coffee, as she rolls her eyes at yet another DIY project to go along with all the other time- and space-consuming projects (I own five grills) that I experiment with in my work as a food and wine journalist and cookbook author. However, given that green coffee beans are inexpensive and roasting them requires relatively little time and effort, I recommend this to anyone who loves good coffee and saving money.
A few factors made me begin roasting. The idea had lodged in my head a few years earlier, when I tasted a cup of home-roasted coffee at the house of an acquaintance. The coffee’s mellow complexity, balanced fruitiness and acidity, and unusually silky texture were unforgettable. Further, the San Francisco Bay Area, where I lived at the time, was a locus of Third Wave coffee, which loosely describes a collection of like-minded boutique roasters and coffee shops (Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Blue Bottle, to name a few), which arose vaguely around the turn of the millennium. Operating on a much smaller scale and in a different style from, say, Starbucks or Peet’s (whose advent pretty much marked the start of the Second Wave), Third Wave roasters saw coffee not as a vehicle for sweetened, fattened caffeine delivery but as an artisanal product worthy of the kind of attention and devotion applied to wine. Third Wave coffees emphasize provenance (delving into country, region, farm, process), heightened precision in roasting and brewing, and roasts that tend to be much lighter than the Second Wave behemoths.
It was the last — the lighter roasts — that led me to roast at home. Third Wave roasters talk about expressing the varietal character, origin, and terroir of their coffee beans, which dark-roasting obscures, much as oak and overripeness obliterate nuances in wine. While I had developed a deep antipathy toward burnt-tasting Second Wave coffee, I was also put off by the frequent extreme lightness of Third Wave coffee. In flavor, very light roasts tend toward fruity, which is why you see descriptors such as blueberry, cherry, lemon, and hibiscus. While I don’t mind suggestions of fruit and flowers, I prefer coffee based on classic chocolate and nutty notes, so long as they’re not burnt. Light-roast beans also tend to brew coffee that’s very high in acid, which is just not a sensation I love. For a number of years, I couldn’t find many coffees in eat classic style I like, so I decided to try to create it for myself.
First, I had to procure green coffee beans. Luckily, several US businesses have good selections and ship domestically and internationally. I use the Oakland, California-based Sweet Maria’s, which has made a name for itself as a top supplier of unroasted beans. Its easy-to-use website contains an inventory of 40 or so diverse coffees as well as a great deal of information about beans and roasting. Thompson Owen, co-founder of Sweet Maria’s, told me that about 20 percent of its green coffee goes to small shops, while the rest is bought up by individual home roasters.
Sweet Maria’s imports from some 16 countries in Central and South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Asia. It offers a taste profile for each coffee and a recommended roasting range, which I’ve found to be quite accurate. It’s worth perusing this information to familiarize yourself with the process. I began by buying sample packs of beans from various countries. Early on, I found that Guatemala beans roast easily and well and offer pleasing flavors. I learned that, in my method, peaberry beans roast very well. (A peaberry occurs when only one seed develops in the coffee cherry rather than two; it’s smaller and assumes a rounder shape.) A pound of green beans from Sweet Maria’s runs anywhere from $5 to $10, with most in the $6 to $8 dollar range. I recommend buying a selection and taking notes on each coffee when you roast it. Eventually, you’ll find beans that work well for the way you roast and the flavors you enjoy coming back to, even as you explore various origins.
While green coffee can be stored without decline for a long time, it may not be as long as you imagine. “People used to say that green coffee remains fresh for two years, but it’s absolutely not true,” says Owen. “You can taste age in green coffee easily at one year. It is best to use it within six months to a year.” I tend to buy eight pounds every three or four months.
Next, you must choose your method, of which there are many. You can roast in the oven, on the stovetop, with an air roaster like a repurposed popcorn popper, or with a dedicated coffee-roasting machine, whose price can run from the low hundreds into the thousands. I use the skillet method, which must be the most basic and cheapest in existence. You simply cook the beans in a skillet, much as you might sauté vegetables.
All the equipment consists of items you probably already have in your kitchen: a cast-iron skillet or a large Dutch oven (mine is a 9-quart Le Creuset), a large wire whisk, and two large colanders. (One of my colanders is deep and cylindrical, repurposed from a previous life as the strainer insert in a pasta-cooking set; the other is the standard hemisphere with legs.) I also use a portable gas burner, shaped just like a burner on a stovetop, fueled by disposable butane canisters, so that I can roast outdoors and avoid setting off the smoke detector. This is optional, though. Good-quality kitchen stove hoods can usually handle the amount of smoke released during roasting. I used to use a laser thermometer to gauge the surface temperature of the pan on the stovetop before I added the green coffee beans; my current technique obviates that. Further, I wear two heatproof grilling gloves for protection and comfort throughout the cook.
Despite Thompson Owen’s lofty place in the coffee industry, he maintains a very open mind about roasting and is enthusiastic even about crude stovetop roasting. That’s refreshing, because other coffee entrepreneurs I talked to expressed surprise and mild disdain when I told them how I roast and that I’m frequently pleased with the results.
“What I love about skillet roasting,” Owen said, “is that it’s the only method where the whole process unfolds in front of you. It’s so accessible. With every roasting machine or even in the oven, you are more and more removed from the process. You can’t quite see what’s going on, because the beans are in a drum, behind a door. You kind of feel like you’re guessing. But on the stovetop, you experience it all and can adjust.”
After my first few months using a cast-iron skillet and spilling an annoying number of beans, I had the brilliant idea to switch to a taller-sided Dutch oven. That also allowed me to roast a full pound of beans at once, which saved having to roast smaller amounts more often. I recommend it. Now I also preheat the Dutch oven in my regular oven for an hour before roasting. I’ve experimented with temperatures from 400° to 500° F (about 200° to 250° C) and recommend 425° F (about 220° C) as a good starting place. Preheating ensures the Dutch oven will be uniformly at the proper temperature. When I move the pot to a burner, I set a medium flame, which I usually adjust two or three times during the roast.
I pour the beans into the pot and immediately begin to stir with the whisk. In a professional drum roaster, the beans cook through a combination of conduction and convection. Conductive heat is transferred when the beans come in contact with the hot metal and each other, while convective heat acts via the flow of hot air. The pot relies on conduction, so you have to keep the beans in constant motion to minimize scorching. Obviously, it’s impossible to keep all the beans moving all the time, so I whisk in a spiral from the circumference of the pot to the middle. Whisk as fast as you can without sending any beans out of the pot.
Roasting a whole pound almost always takes somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes, depending on the amount of heat and the density of the beans. After a few minutes of whisking, you’ll notice the beans have shifted in color, fading from their initial light green to gray. In the 3-to-7-minute range, the color begins to turn golden yellow, and, in the early wisps of smoke, a grassy smell emerges backed by the distinctive scent of chocolatey coffee beans. The smoke only becomes more profuse as the beans turn a light brown in the 6-to-8-minute range.
As the browning continues, you can feel the volume of the beans change, too. They’re losing moisture but also growing in size, which you can feel in the mass as you stir. Because of the smoke, without good light it can be difficult to see what’s happening. Eventually, you start to hear a sharp popping, sporadic and then accelerating as the beans turn darker brown. This is the “first crack” and is reminiscent of popping corn. First crack occurs as the moisture in the beans vaporizes and forces its way out, breaking the cell walls, expanding the bean, and reducing its density.
There is a “second crack,” which beans undergo when they turn black, shiny, and achieve the level of charry roast commonly called French or Italian. For the medium roast I seek, I never arrive at second crack. But the time that elapses after first crack is crucial. If I feel the coffee needs more time, I may turn the heat down a touch to slow the momentum. Or if the first crack seems to be lagging, I might turn up the heat to power through. First crack is when the coffee becomes drinkable, but its optimal flavor profile is still to be determined. Most of my coffees, however, are just finishing first crack when I remove them.
I tend to look for a rich brown color without many black or shiny beans. Shininess is often a better indication of roast level than color. When the beans develop a reflective sheen, you can bet they’ll taste charred. The stovetop method does not yield batches with particularly uniform color, so be prepared for a range. I also smell to gauge doneness — a rich, chocolatey aroma of roasted nuts and some savory smoke, but not burnt.
Removing the beans from the heat at just the right point requires snap judgment, informed by experience and some intuition. Since I roast only every 10 to 14 days, and rarely the same variety of beans twice in a row, I rely more on the latter. Professional roasters would roast multiple test batches, then cup the beans (brew a dilute coffee to assess the results). But I’m parsimonious, so I just live with the results, which fortunately are usually good. (One batch charred to a bitter black went to a grateful neighbor who enjoys Second Wave coffee.)
Pull the beans from the heat a few moments before you think they’re done, as the cooking will continue even after that. I dump the beans instantly into one of the colanders and then step outside or out into the yard to cool them by pouring them back and forth from one colander to the other. This also allows the chaff (the light, toasted outer skins) to blow off into the air. I might do this for five minutes, occasionally just swirling the beans inside one of the colanders to loosen more of the chaff. Then I pour the beans into a bowl and finish cooling them in the refrigerator. Altogether, the active time is 15 to 20 minutes, and the cost of raw goods is about $8. Because the coffee loses about 4 ounces of weight, my pound becomes 12 ounces, which from a professional roaster in my area would cost $20, a price that will only be going up, as climate change is wreaking havoc for coffee growers. The arabica species, which is what goes into high-quality coffee these days, has relatively specific climate needs, and increasing temperatures will soon force growers to either change species or discover new locales.
You can brew the beans instantly, but the flavor and expressiveness improve substantially after a day or two or three, during which the beans release carbon dioxide. Degassing affects the coffee’s flavor, as the carbon dioxide, rushing to escape the beans, inhibits the extraction of flavor compounds when hot water is added. That’s also why, in a pour-over scenario, I “bloom” the coffee by adding just a little hot water and letting the coffee bubble and burble for 30 seconds or so before beginning the actual brew. I grind fairly fine and brew with the classic pour-over method using a paper filter, with 96° C (205° F) water and a general ratio of 16 to 17 grams of water to each gram of beans. I find it easiest to simply weigh both water and coffee, so, for instance, 650 grams of water are poured through 40 grams of coffee. I don’t like to drink my coffee particularly hot, as I have trouble tasting it that way. I let it cool to the 130° F (54° C) range and drink it happily. I prefer beans that have rested for at least two days and up to 10 days since roasting, though I will continue to use them for up to two weeks.
If you try roasting your own beans, I suspect you’ll note the unusually silky, soft texture of the coffee. If you don’t roast too dark — the beans haven’t become at all shiny — you’ll find pleasantly pert and harmonious flavors, not bitter or astringent, with a complexity bringing together fruity, chocolatey, and earthy notes. For some reason, the texture always seems to be exceptional, and I don’t know why. The physical size of the coffee particles dissolved in hot water must be the same as with any other coffee. But somehow this stuff has a texture so compelling as to make me appreciate it every time I brew a cup.
“I do think that aromatics and acidity contribute to the sense that coffee is not thin like water or tea. Definitely acidity counteracts a sense of body. But I don’t know how else to explain our perception of texture,” Thompson Owen said. He may be onto something, as cold brew, which has lower acidity than hot-brewed coffee, always feels heavier and denser. Perhaps my distaste for high-acid coffee, which led me to home roasting in the first place, was misdiagnosed. Perhaps I’m actually drawn to acidity, just not too high. Indeed, when it comes to wine, I prefer high-acid styles, which have more vitality and verve. The acidity can also provide structure and influence the flavor of the wine. But, of course, acidity must be balanced, as a surfeit can create an impression of stridency or austerity.
“Mouthfeel and body are so tough to explain with coffee, because you know it’s not water,” Owen continued. “It’s not the first thing that registers, but I think the completeness of a cup of coffee comes from all of these things (acidity, aromatics) gives this sense that it’s not dead, that it’s not limp and flat.”
Indeed, that such a cup of coffee contains flowing, graceful energy. And I never feel that more keenly than when I roast the beans myself. ●
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