It is great fun to roast your own coffee beans. This is taking espresso coffee to the next level by roasting your own coffee beans. When it comes to coffee roasting there is a history of serious effort to produce the perfect cup. The good news for us is that coffee can be roasted at home on a domestic scale. Personally I use a Gene Cafe roaster which happily roasts about 300 g of coffee at a time. My approach is 3 batches of 300 g.
The Cafe Gene Coffee roasting machine
In Melbourne it is the middle of winter and about 8ºC outside, so I have set my coffee roaster up on the stove top. Because coffee roasting produces smoke the exhaust fan on the range hood has been cranked up to full power.
CoffeeSnobs
The bean I am roasting according to CoffeeSnobs.com.au is “…the best Peruvian organic I have ever tried.” Link to CoffeeSnobs.com.au
The beans are added to the roaster and it is set to roast at 235°C.
At around the 12 minute mark the beans hit first crack. This is a distinctive popcorn poping noise that the bean makes. At this time I also drop the temperature at this point by 10°C to 225°C.
At 16 minutes the beans hit 2nd crack. This sound is more of a burning firewood crack noise. It is also accompanied by small spots of oil forming on the beans. I like to think of this as “angel tears” and is usually the point I dump the beans.
Espresso Time
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