I was paging through a home brewing catalog some fifteen years ago when I noticed green coffee beans for sale. Why did a beer supply catalog have coffee beans for sale, I wondered? This made me Google coffee roasting. One of the many ways home roasters roasted coffee was with a paint stripping heat gun (think hair drier on steroids), a bowl, and a spoon. This intrigued me. I had the equipment already, all I needed was to get some unroasted beans. I went to a local Dunn Brothers coffee shop and persuaded the barista to sell me a pound of green coffee beans. My first attempt at roasting was very iffy, but the results were better tasting coffee than I ever had. It was probably more the experience that made it better than the coffee itself. I was hooked.

 I joined some online home roasting clubs and started to purchase five pound lots of green coffee. There was a lot of good advice for a newcomer to the art of roasting. It turns out that five pounds turns to four pounds after the beans are roasted due to loss of moisture. It also turns out that the beans double in size.

  Five pounds turned into ten, and ten pounds turned into twenty. My family and friends started taking a shine to my endeavors. I couldn’t keep up with the heat gun roasting, I needed something with more volume. I purchased a perforated stainless- steel drum that went on a BBQ spit. I also needed a heat source that had the oomph to get a kilo of green beans to the proper temps required to roast. I had a “jet” burner, like a turkey fryer burner, fueled by propane. That should be plenty of heat. Now I needed to contain the heat. I sacrificed an old Weber Kettle grill. I cut the bottom off of it so it sat on the burner. I had to sit and turn the spit by hand, but this more than doubled my volume.

 After a few years on the improvised roaster, and selling roasted coffee at the local Farmers Market, I got a chance to lease time on a REAL commercial roaster - it’s capacity was six pounds. Four years later the owner purchased a larger roaster. I was roasting on a ten kilo capacity commercial roaster. I now have a one kilo roaster at home due to limitations of the Cottage Industry License that I must have to sell at the Farmers Market.

 After all the upgrades to my roasting equipment, I still think I learned more about roasting coffee from the heat gun – bowl roasting that I started on. Why? Because I had to pay attention to the sights and sounds and smells that are produced during the phases of the roast. It was relatively easy to transfer that knowledge to a commercial roaster.

To be continued………