Roasting Apparatus

I just realized that I haven't mentioned what I am roasting with. All these roast profiles aren't that useful unless you have some idea what I am doing.

Anyhoo, I originally started out roasting using an iRoast2. This is a decent starter machine, but I had some quality issues with it (the power base kept dying), and the amount of beans you can roast at one time is rather limited. Still, the coffee was decent, and had the typical air-roaster quality of "brightness" in the cup.

At this point, a hoard of people are going to come out of the woodwork (or maybe not, since not too many people read these entries...) and tell me that you can produce great roasted coffee with a wok, a roasting pan, a heat gun and a dog bowl, a popcorn popper, a blowtorch, or perhaps a small thermonuclear explosion. In a sense they are correct, and you can read for hours and hours on the web about these things.

However, roasting coffee is more than "turning beans brown". The profiles of time and temperature make a huge difference to the final product. Even two roasts with exactly the same final roast time, with different ways of getting there can be completely different. It is useful to have some control over time and temperature (and ramp rate if you can get it). This can be done manually with some effort, but there are some machines out there that make it much simpler. I am a gadget guy, so I went the route of buying a GeneCafe.

I won't review the machine here; you can read about it in the link above, or search around on Coffee Geek or other web sites. Suffice to say that you have very good control over the key variables.

My typical batch size is 8oz. The way I drink coffee at home, that gets me through about a week. For espresso, I'll often drop it down to 6oz or so, since I drink less espresso than drip coffee. I also like to preheat the machine a bit before adding the beans. There is a lot of glass and metal that should get hot first, such that the thermal energy goes into the coffee beans instead of heating up the machine. Pre-heating can also have a pronounced effect on the ability to hear first crack, which I can talk about another time.

For cooling, I typically use the "Emergency stop" procedure which cools the coffee in the drum down to about 212 degrees. Then I move the coffee to a sheet pan on my granite countertop, which quickly cools things to room temperature. I then let the machine complete the rest of its cooling cycle down to 140 degrees, which hopefully will help out the lifetime of the roaster.

There are other options out there as well, ranging from the now very popular Behmor roaster, the Hottop, and others. However, my GeneCafe is going strong, and makes great coffee.

As for brewing the coffee, I have an article I need to parse through before posting here, but there is a lot to say on that topic as well.