Some of my homebrewing
friends have been experimenting with roasting their own
coffee. I’m not able to taste the results of their experiments,
because I’m extremely sensitive to caffeine, so I only drink
decaffeinated coffee, and that isn’t what they brew.
But the smell of what they do is certainly tantalizing, so I
spent some time drooling over the Sweetmarias.com website. I
ordered some coffeemaker cleaning stuff, and a new
German-engineered coffee grinder, and found I was enjoying
spending a bit more time on my coffee-brewing method and getting
better results. So last week I took the plunge and ordered a Fresh
Roast Plus 8 Home Coffee Roaster and eight different kinds of
decaffeinated green coffee beens.
If you want to try this without spending money and kitchen
space on a single-purpose gadget, you can read the instructions
for doing it in a popcorn popper at SweetMaria’s, or this instructable.
Anyway, I have roasted one batch of Kenya AB
Auction Lot WP Decaf coffee and I can
report:
- Next time I will follow the instructions to do the roasting
under the stove hood, or outdoors on the fire escape. Compared with how
good all the other smells to do with making coffee are, the
smell of beans roasting just isn’t the way you want your house to smell. - But once you’ve roasted it, and are handling the beans, it’s
definitely worth it to smell the fresh roast. I like opening a
new bag of commercially roasted coffee, and this is much
better. The description of this coffee on the bag is:Lively, bright cup with citrus, meyer lemon,
caramel and floral sweetness.You can really smell
most of that without brewing the coffee at all. - I knew I was going to have to make adjustments to my brewing
method when I changed my buying and roasting methods. This
first batch is definitely not as strong as I like my coffee, but the
flavor is really good.
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