Adventures in Coffee Roasting

As anybody who knows me will tell you, I like my coffee. Like.. A LOT. A while ago my wife and I were given an air fryer by her parents so I tracked down a small bag of green coffee beans and had a go at roasting them in the air fryer. It didn't go super well. It was too hard to see what was going on without losing half my heat and the beans would fall through the holes in the pan and get stuck and burn.

If you read up on home coffee roasting, among the reviews for $1000 roasting machines and scary DIY contraptions, there are a lot of references to using a popcorn maker. Last week my state went in to a lockdown and I was bored, surfing around on eBay and I found a popcorn maker for like $29 shipped. Why not?

My first attempt turned out too darkly roasted. I stopped when it looked good but didn't account for the coffee continuing to develop as it cooled. It was drinkable but it just tasted like bitter, harsh coffee with none of the nutty toffee flavours Brazilian coffee is capable of.

Attempt number 2 was much more successful, while still a little over developed, it tastes much nicer!

Economically it would make sense for me to roast my own coffee, a 250g bag of roasted specialty coffee beans can cost up to $22, whereas 1000g of green beans is around $11. I'm not sure if I'll move towards roasting my own beans full time though. I can only roast 100g at a time and I'm not guaranteed any level of quality like I would be buying from a commercial roaster but it's a fun experiment!