Ever since I heard it was possible to roast your own coffee beans at home with an air popper (‘though, I suppose, the process started long before that when I started tasting the first really good coffee of my life at Seattle’s independent coffee shops), I was intrigued but not enough to do the research to figure out exactly how to do it.
Then along came a photography client who gave me a pound of his home roasted coffee. Yeah, so like three days later, Jake’s order from Sweet Maria’s had arrived at our door. All five pounds of green bean ready-to-make-into-deliciousness. We roasted our first two batches last night on the very same trusty old Wear Ever popper I remember standing at the kitchen counter hovering over when I was five watching popcorn swirl around in the hot air for us to throw into a big grocery bag and take with us to the high school football game. The very same.
So the first of which maybe didn’t turn out so great. But the SECOND one… ohhh yeah. Nearly perfect, or at least good enough for our first go-round of it! And at half the price of the best beans we usually buy, not too shabby. Plus, there’s all the satisfaction we get from doing it ourselves, which is one of my favorite things.