I drink coffee. Not only do I drink coffee, I do care enough about the coffee that I make at home that I did a lot of research to decide what kind of machine and what brand and model to buy. In addition to the hardware, there is the software, and I try to get freshly roasted beans. Unfortunately, my favorite local coffee roaster sold his business, and the new owners cannot reliably deliver the same quality of coffee.

So, how can I make sure that I always have freshly roasted coffee beans available? Or, as some of my friends would put it, how can I waste even more time on my morning cup of coffee?

Of course, home roasting is the answer to that question.

How to turn a bag of green coffee beans into something that can be used in a coffee maker or an espresso machine? After some serious research online I noticed that one company name came up again and again: Sweet Maria’s Home Coffee Roasting Supplies.

More after the jump…In addition to the 5 pounds of the Espresso Monkey Blend, I also got the espresso sampler pack (this is what’s left, I already went through three of the samples):

OK, I have green coffee beans, and I want to end up with something like this:

How do I do that? My first attempts were not very successful – I tried to use a hot air popcorn popper. There are numerous reports online from people who are able to use such a cheap device to roast some fine coffee. My popper however did not get hot enough. I was not even able to get to the first crack stage of the roasting process.

There are a bunch of other methods like pan roasting, or fire roasting, but I wanted something simpler, something that would just work. I can always spend some time in the future on a home build propane heated roaster. I decided to go with an entry level home roasting machine:

Let’s roast a batch of beans… First, take the batteries out of the smoke detector.

The FreshRoast is not a machine to roast a large batch of coffee, it can do about 2 1/4 oz. at a time. That’s not much. I usually do three batches in a row (with the required 20 minutes of cool down time in between the batches).

It’s fun to watch the coffee get darker and darker. At the beginning, the beans are greenish, and look more like split peas than like roasted coffee.

Within a few moments in the hot air stream, they slowly start to turn brown. At first we have something that looks like roasted peanuts. This is the stage where the beans release a grassy smell, which turns into the smell of hay.

The beans get moved around the roasting chamber by hot, rapidly moving air.

Once the beans dry, some of the chaff comes off the beans, and the air stream will move these light pieces of bean skin to the chaff collector.

A slightly darker shade of light brown.

An even darker shade of light brown.

A light shade of medium brown.

A medium shade of medium brown.

A darker shade of medium brown.

The experts of course know that we are moving through the different roasting levels of cinnamon, half city, New England, full city, … And, I’ll stop trying to make up descriptions for the different roasting levels.

I usually stop the roasting during or shortly after the second crack stage. The beans will have a slightly shiny surface at that point, because some of the internal oils will have traveled to the surface.

After cooling, and some more chaff removal, this is what the beans look like:

The FreshRoast Plus 8 has relatively good chaff collector. After the top cools down enough, it’s very easy to get rid of the collected chaff.

The beans are ready to be used for espresso after about 12-24 hours.

People who know me know how important good coffee is to me. For the last two years I’ve been using a Rancilio Silvia to brew my morning cappuccino. And that is exactly what I wanted to do last Sunday morning:

So, I grind, tamp, and install the filter. I push the button, and within a split second, I see light brown water shooting out of the filter…

That’s not what’s supposed to happen. Maybe I did not tamp enough… So, I try again – with the same result. Maybe the setting on my grinder got changed, adjust, grind, tamp, and give it another try – with the same result.

I notice that I can turn the handle of the filter a lot farther than usually… Did something break in the group head?

ARRRRGGGGHHHH… I need my morning coffee! My despair is good news for the local coffee shop.

After breakfast, I try to get on Rancilio’s web site to see if they have any troubleshooting instructions. The web site is down. The Italian web site is down too. Is this a conspiracy to drive me nuts?

OK, I have not cleaned the machine in a while, let’s start with that. Sure enough, the machine needed a good cleaning. I put everything together again, try another shot – the same result.

While disposing of the grounds, I notice something: The grounds are cold. They should be hot, but given the speed with which the water rushed through, at least a bit warm. Cold. Hmmm… I realize that not just the grounds are cold, the filter is cold too… and the group head too, and the whole machine is cold. Even though the “heating” lamp is on, the machine is not heating.

Aha! That explains everything. How could I miss that important clue?

So, let’s try Google. And sure enough, I find information about how to reset the thermal protection “thingy”. I open the machine, look around, and there it is: A small red button. I push it and hear a “click”.

I suppose that means that the thing actually got triggered. After putting the cup warming tray back on I turn the machine on, and after a couple of minutes I can feel how it is getting warm. Bingo!

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I do not wait the 30 minutes the machine usually needs to warm up, I do part of the “Cheating Ms. Silvia” process and pull a shot after 15 minutes: It’s delicious!

I have an image on Flickr that’s titled “Coffee Sludge Pattern” – it’s a picture of the dried coffee sludge that remains in the drip pan of my Rancilio Silvia espresso machine.

Every now and then I check the stats for my Flickr account, and yesterday I noticed that somebody did actually search for “coffee sludge” and found my picture. That of course piqued my interest, and I needed to know what else somebody would find when searching for “coffee sludge”.

Here is one such link:

http://www.mailman.srv.ualberta.ca/pipermail/patho-l/1998-November/005656.html

Let me just say that forensic pathologists are gross…

This is another one of my coffee themed pictures. There really are four espresso makers lined up

My Flickr page

Another coffee related picture. This one is of a cappuccino cup taken under a light tent.

My Flickr Page

This is a composite of almost 30 images. I used/abused a stitching program (that usually used to create panoramas) and fed it pictures that don’t line up like a pano… I tried different parameters, different order of the source images, and this one looked the best (I guess that’s a very subjective assessment).

This image – another one with a coffee theme – is a long exposure (39 seconds, f/8) of my stove top espresso maker (see this link for a picture that shows four of them), traced with a laser pointer.

This is the next photo in my series of coffee related posts. These are the cups that I use every day for my morning cappuccino and my after work espresso(s).