SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Bo Brown got a cheese-making kit from her boyfriend and, fearing a do-it-yourself disaster, refused to even tinker with it. A Wisconsin native, she grew up among cheeseheads and figured the professionals did it better anyway. Sweet as the present was, she informed her boyfriend that she wasn’t interested in the kit or any other gourmet gadgets. “No more kitchen gifts,” she said. “Thank you very much.”
But luckily, Bob Faull did what boyfriends often do in these situations: He ignored her feelings entirely. Inspired by her daily complaints about bad-tasting coffee, Faull proudly handed Brown a manual coffee grinder, Japanese vacuum coffee pot and, strangest of all, several bags of green, unroasted coffee beans and an electric popcorn popper.
Though she was annoyed at first, the gift soon drew her into the eclectic world of the home coffee roaster. Within days, she was making time to roast her own coffee beans, pouring a few handfuls of green, hay-smelling Arabica into the popper and roasting them for about 5 minutes as they swirled and cracked inside the tinted-plastic chamber.
Now, three years later, the thought of buying commercial, pre-roasted coffee beans makes her shudder. She takes notes on the different roasting profiles of her favorite varieties and keeps a spare popper at her Hyde Park apartment in case one breaks.
“To me, it’s worth the effort,” Brown says. “Store-bought coffee can be terrible. It’s bitter, without subtlety. There’s no difference in taste between a bean from South America and a bean from Africa. When you’re buying from a place like Starbucks, it all tastes the same.”
People have been roasting the seeds of the coffee tree since the 16th Century, and home roasters were common kitchen appliances until the late 1800s. Then giant coffee factories, roasting shops and the convenience of ready-to-go beans took over.
Now home roasting is in the midst of a renaissance. In kitchens, garages, fireplaces, back yards and even bathtubs across the country, thousands of passionate coffee lovers are shunning commercially roasted beans and doing it themselves. Like Brown, they say the difference is dramatic, like comparing stale bread with a loaf that’s fresh from the oven.
“Store-bought coffee can be roasted wrong or it’s just been sitting on the shelves too long,” Brown says. “I tell people I roast my own and their eyes glaze over because they don’t understand that they’re drinking bad coffee and they don’t have to.”
Some casual coffee fans spend 20 minutes or so a week roasting beans, choosing varieties like India Monsoon Malabar just because they like the name. More extreme types travel with their own beans, conduct “cuppings,” or tasting sessions, to figure out their preferred roasting style and loudly slurp coffee in the same way an oenologist tastes wine.
On the Web sites that have fueled home roasting’s recent surge, like coffeegeek.com or Google’s alt.coffee discussion group, fanatics write passionately about beans and roasting techniques or compare the effects of hard and soft water on their espresso machines. Their conversations can be dramatic, combative and arcane, like a dialogue overheard between foodies dining at a four-star restaurant. Take this connoisseur, who bemoans the vagaries of espresso foam:
“Plenty of foam-no big bubbles, nice sheen, often very pourable,” says the recent alt.coffee posting. “The question is, how long should the foam last? . . . I’m amazed at how great the cup looks just after I pour the foam in, but a little disappointed that, if I sit and read the newspaper, the foam drops fairly quickly and is largely gone in, say, 10 minutes. Is this typical of micro foam? Does the drier, shaving-cream type of stuff hang around longer? Or is this a sign of some gross flaw in my frothing technique?”
Among the issues of great importance to roasters is their choice of equipment, from their coffee maker to the cups they use to sip their morning brew. A pre-heated porcelain or ceramic coffee cup, for example, is recommended for purists who don’t want to corrupt the flavor in any way. But few things reveal a roaster’s personality more than his or her roasting machine.
While some use $100, store-bought roasters, or even upgrade to commercial ones that cost exponentially more, many swear by frying pans, electric popcorn poppers from Target, or their own exotic inventions.
Brown’s popper, customized with a tiny hole drilled through its butter holder to accommodate a thermometer, is one of the more simple devices. Some self-professed coffee geeks connect popcorn poppers to computers and microprocessor controls that monitor heat, timing and air flow. Brute-force enthusiasts pour green beans into a metal dog bowl and roast them with an industrial heat gun.
Then there are those, like Butch Burton, who use barbecue grills outfitted with fabricated metal heating drums. Burton, a medical systems salesman in Lake Geneva, Wis., designed the contraption three years ago, buying a three-burner gas grill and asking friends in the metal-fabrication business to turn some rolled steel into a roasting drum. Then he bought a small motor and gear system to turn the beans in the drum.
Burton understands that not everyone is that handy, so he has accumulated a number of West Bend “Poppery I” popcorn poppers, which he calls the “Holy Grail” of easy coffee roasting. “I’ve got eight of them, and I give them to people I know well,” he says. “They can keep them as long as they continue to roast. I do it just to spread the coffee gospel.”
Where to roast is another challenge. During roasting, the green beans emit an earthy aroma that some compare to cut grass or hay, followed by a fair amount of dark smoke. That combo, more than enough to set off a smoke detector-or move roommates to hold their noses-forces some roasters outside to a garage, patio or balcony. More urban types might use the bathroom and rely on an exhaust fan to dispel the smoke, or funnel it outside with the pleated hoses usually attached to clothes dryers. One roaster reports putting the machine in the fireplace of his Lincoln Park townhouse and directing the smoke up the chimney.
“There’s no one great machine out there, store-bought or otherwise,” says coffee guru Kenneth Davids, author of three books on the subject. “Apparently no [manufacturer] has done enough development work before they bring out their roasting machine. So roasting invites tinkering.”
Green coffee beans typically sell for about half the price of roasted ones, but roasting machines, upgrades and other accoutrements add to the expense. “It’s all about the quest for a perfect cup,” says Dave Vincent, of Mokena, who began roasting this year.
His search led him to the Web, where he was intrigued by green-bean sites, message boards and their “Starbucks-and-all-other-corporate-coffee-stinks” gospel. “You go on-line one day and one thing leads to another,” he says. After he read that coffee is best served as espresso, Vincent bought an espresso machine. After he read that the best espresso requires uniform coffee grounds, he bought a high-end grinder.
At first, Vincent experienced only limited success in brewing the perfect cup. Then he learned the essentials of roasting preached by Davids and other experts: Beans taste best when used within five days of roasting; once they are put through a grinder, the beans begin to lose their flavor within minutes, so grind them immediately before brewing; even the highly refined packaging used by Starbucks and other chains can’t keep the air out indefinitely
“This is controversial,” Davids says. “Some people will say that if the packaging is right, you can get fresh coffee right after you open the package. But unless you’re home roasting or buying from a very small company where the roaster is in the back and you know the owner, you’re not going to get coffee consistently at its peak of freshness, even with all the sophisticated packaging strategies. Commercial coffee is usually no better than store-bought bread.”
The number of home roasters is uncertain, but Davids says estimates in the “hundreds of thousands” probably are accurate, and stories about the popularity of green beans abound.
In the Chicago area, Gurnee-based Hearthware Home Products has sold about 15,000 I-Roast coffee-roasting machines since last April. Even commercial roasters are jumping on the bandwagon: Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago was fielding enough calls from home roasters and those curious about it that they started offering tours to show them how they roast their beans. (Reservations are recommended, 888-945-9786, ext. 23) In February, the company began selling green beans on-line.
In Addison, Hans Becker has gone from selling a few pounds of unroasted beans on eBay to launching Coffeemaria, a business named after his wife. In the next few months, Becker plans to open a coffee store and offer lessons on home roasting. In Lincoln Park, informal coffee-roasting classes are held every few months in the Starbucks at 1001 W. Armitage Ave.
Odd as it may seem, Starbucks claims to be OK with home roasting. “We’re in favor of it,” says Chris Gimbl, a spokesman for the chain. “We sold green coffee for a while in Seattle, back in the ’80s.”
But he did offer some motherly advice: “Roasting is tricky,” he said, his voice becoming stern. “It can be dangerous because you’re using very high temperatures. So we would just ask people to be careful and then go ahead.”
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WHERE YOU CAN GET IT:
– Intelligentsia Coffee Roasters in Chicago (intelligentsiacoffee.com) and Coffeemaria in Addison (coffeemaria.com) are two local roasters that sell high-quality green beans.
Recommendations from coffeegeek.com:
– Coffee Wholesalers (coffeewholesalers.com)
– Coffee Bean Corral (coffeebeancorral.com)
– Sweet Maria’s Coffee (sweetmarias.com)
