OFF-TOPIC: Home Coffee Roasting

I’m going a little “Off-Topic” here (again), so this won’t be be 100% related to my business or my life as a consultant / freelancer. This is happening enough I created its own category. Today, I’ll be sharing my Home Coffee Roasting Adventure!  If you’re in the coffee business, maybe this can be helpful to you. Or if you just love drinking coffee, maybe this will catch your fancy too.

This year, my bonus reward to myself was a home coffee roaster!  Very entry-level, but I sprung for a FreshRoast SR500 along with a few hundred dollars in accessories and green beans to roast. All told, my investment was about $500 ($180 was the actual roaster), which isn’t a lot but when you live the freelancer lifestyle, cutting down extraneous costs is one way to survive low cash flow months.

My Coffee Saga

One of the areas I cut back on when I started working from home was going out for coffee. I used to frequent a coffee shop twice daily, spending probably $10-12/day.  That’s $50/week and $200/month. That’s just the work-week, not to mention social coffees on the weekend. It adds up! And if I really liked the cafe, I bought their beans so I can brew it at home on the weekends. When I owned my own coffee shop, I was in heaven! Freshly roasted beans from our supplier, top-notch commercial espresso equipment, 24/7 access and all at a wholesale cost! That was the best…while it lasted. Ironically, at the time, learning to roast wasn’t where we were taking our coffee shop. So I’ve only recently discovered the joys of home roasting.

When I started freelancing, my espresso consumption took a dramatic turn. It was now grocery store espresso whole beans for me. I waited for sales so I could load up on a good brand of coffee. Buying enough to last between sales, I’d freeze the beans — for weeks/months at a time.

This was economical but really took the joy out of lattes for me. When I started Keto,  it’s no wonder lattes were so easy to give up. Even before going Keto, I noticed I didn’t finish my morning latte. I’ve never needed the caffeine (I can have a latte at 9PM and be asleep by 9:30PM.) but I loved the taste and the social experience of having coffee with friends.

Last year, my bonus reward was a new espresso machine. This brought back some of my love for coffee. I now have an espresso machine capable of steaming milk to make latte art! I love starting my morning by pouring beautiful latte art! Honestly, it’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. After a year with the machine, I noticed I still wasn’t finishing my morning lattes. Pouring latte art had become the pinnacle of my espresso experience… drinking the latte was secondary.

I realized the problem was at the core of what makes good coffee — the beans! Grocery store coffee beans frozen for months at a time isn’t exactly the epitome of “fresh”.

Why Roast at Home?

This brings me to how I decided to roast my own coffee. Well, truth be told, the idea originally came to me while watching a cooking show where the host built a home-made coffee roaster. How cool was that?!! Months later, the idea stuck enough that I made it my reward bonus goal to buy a home roaster.

As it turns out, green coffee beans (that is, beans before they’ve been roasted) are fairly cheap. When you buy a 12 oz bag of single origin beans from a specialty coffee shop, it can cost anywhere from $15 – 25. Some beans go for even more if it’s a rare, high-quality bean (e.g. Panama Geisha). You can buy the same single-origin bean from green bean retailers for a fraction of the cost and roast it yourself to your own taste! When I say a fraction of the cost, I really do mean it. I’ve seen the exact same coffee bean sold by the same retailer as green bean for $4/lb and roasted whole bean for $20 for a 12 oz bag.

There’s a considerable mark-up for roasted coffee beans. I think it’s fair and reasonable, but that doesn’t mean I want to pay it. There’s a lot that goes into roasting coffee, as I’ve learned recently. I don’t begrudge coffee roasters their profit margin because I understand better now what goes into it.  That said, for a modest investment, I can roast my own coffee for a fraction of the cost. Not only that, I can roast to my own flavor preference. Also, it’s a lot of fun!

Advantages to Home Roasting

Cost

I might not have started down this path if there wasn’t long-term cost-saving potential. Well, maybe I still would have but the cost-savings are definitely there. Here’s my cost savings. I buy Peet’s coffee from the grocery store. Regular price is $10 for a 12 oz bag. But I always buy it when it’s on super sale for $6 and then I freeze and store for weeks/months. Most of the green coffee beans I buy range from $3-5/lb. Let’s call it $4 on average for 16 oz. During the roasting process, you are drying out the beans and lose up to 20% in weight, so really, that 16 oz drops down to about 13 oz, but let’s just call it 12 oz. So, even compared to grocery store, super sale prices, roasting at home is a lot cheaper.

Quality / Sustainability

Quality is probably the biggest reasons to roast at home. When you buy green beans, you can pick exactly the origin, farm/estate, and quality of bean you want. I suspect that even the cheapest green beans I’m buying are still higher quality than most espresso blends at the grocery store. Good coffee comes first from high-quality green beans that are processed with care and quality.  It’s true that most espressos are blends of different beans. Many include Robusta beans to add that crema we  espresso drinkers love so much. As a home roaster, you can decide what goes into your espresso. Maybe you’re doing single origin espresso. Maybe you do want to include Robusta beans vs. 100% Arabica. You get to control the quality of the beans and where you source them from.

Most green bean retailers source from single estates or cooperatives and will tell you a little bit about the farms. This can give you an idea of whether the beans you’re buying are sustainable and whether the people working there are paid fairly. It’s great that these smaller farms have just as fair a chance at getting a cut of the coffee industry as the larger estates. Sometimes it’s these smaller farms that turn out the best tasting beans!

Variety

One of the great things about visiting coffee shops was trying new blends, new single origins, etc. I don’t think what coffee shops charge is outrageous (I used to own a coffee shop, afterall). But for my freelancing lifestyle, it’s not an expense I wanted to make a daily habit. However, for less than the price of a 12 oz latte, I can buy an entire pound of single origin green coffee beans!

One of the first things I did was buy beans from all over the world. I might have gotten a bit overzealous as I’m now sitting on over 20 lbs of green coffee beans. But I have coffee from Burundi, Panama, Colombia, Indonesia, India, Mexico, Brazil, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, etc. If you love trying new coffees, this is such a great way to do it. I like Peet’s coffee, but I limited myself to their offerings — primarily due to cost. Now I can have coffee around the world for even less than what I was paying for grocery store bought! Green beans store a lot longer than roasted beans, so buying in bulk and storing properly will have negligible impact on the flavor of the bean. Some people say properly stored beans can last years and even improve in taste over time (like wine).

And if we’re really going to talk about cost savings, a 12 oz bag of roasted single origin coffee costs WAY more than $10 grocery store coffee. Average price is probably around $20 per bag.

Freshness

This may be the 2nd biggest reason to roast at home. Roasted coffee beans have a shelf life when it comes to their peak taste. You can store roasted coffee beans (properly) for a long time. That doesn’t mean they taste good for that length of time. And for sure you won’t be drinking coffee in its prime if you’re buying it already ground, which most of the time you have to if you’re buying at a grocery store.

Most coffees peak in flavor anywhere from 3-7 days after they are roasted and are best enjoyed maybe another 5-7 days after that.  After I got into roasting, I noticed the roast date on my grocery store coffee (side note: kudos to Peet’s for printing a roast date — most roasters retailing at grocery stores don’t). Even newly bought whole bean bags were roasted at least a month ago and the “best by” date was months out from now. These coffees are packaged to try to retain the freshness, but honestly, nothing will beat drinking coffee in that special window when it’s at its peak.

In fact, I watched a YouTube video where a guy said that even if you do a sub-par job roasting your beans at home, it will still taste better than professionally roasted grocery store coffee. I was skeptical. In fact, I mentally prepared myself to not feel bad if my first few roasts were undrinkable and a complete waste of beans. But what he said is true. My first roast tasted SO much better than the store-bought coffee I was drinking. I did a lot of research and planning before my first roast. But even still, I know it was far from perfect. Yet, it still tasted considerably better than the store-bought beans — even Peet’s.

I’m not saying I can roast coffee better than Peet’s. I’m just saying by the time Peet’s coffee reaches the grocery store, to my home, out of my freezer, it’s lost a lot of what made it so spectacular.

Fun

Roasting at home is SO much fun. I haven’t been at it very long, but I’m sure it’ll be long while yet before it even begins to lose its allure. It hits on so many things that make it enjoyable.

There’s some science to it — measuring temperature and “profiling” your roast. There’s equipment, gadgets and software to measure, record and analyze this data. This ticks the gadget geek in me as well as my penchant for data and analysis. You can get very geeky about this and I’ve only begin to scratch the surface.  When my current equipment isn’t enough, I’ll be upgrading to a phidget and Artisan software to truly geek out.

There’s also an art to roasting. It’s a very sensory experience. During the roasting process, often the more reliable thing you can count on is not the graphs and temperature readings but your own senses.  Coffee smells different at different phases of roasting. It also makes audible sounds called “First Crack” and “Second Crack” when certain chemical reactions in the bean take place. And of course, visually, the beans do change color right before your eyes – from green to yellow to brown. Watching this process unfold over 7-10 minutes never gets boring. And the reward? Getting to taste your own coffee!

As if all of that wasn’t fun enough, there’s also the joy of tasting coffee grown from around the world. Every bean has its own nuanced tasting notes. I won’t pretend that my taste buds are sophisticated enough to detect everything that’s described in a bean, but I am developing that sense. I’m also looking forward to creating my own blends and experimenting with not just different roast levels for the same bean but mixing beans together.

Challenges of Roasting From Home

Time. Roasting your own coffee takes a lot more time than driving to the store and buying a bag of coffee. For one thing, you have to wait a couple days after roasting to begin enjoying it. That gives the beans time to off-gas and lets the flavors settle in. For darker, espresso roasts, it can take 5-7 days before freshly roasted beans are ready for drinking. A trip to Safeway to buy a bag of coffee takes maybe 15 minutes.

This is easily solved by getting into a roasting schedule so you always have beans ready. Nevertheless, it’s a time commitment, so if you don’t enjoy the process, maybe it’s not for you.  I’m not even a heavy espresso drinker (one latte a day) but I’ll probably have to roast a couple batches every week to always have a supply of coffee beans at their peak available for brewing.

Skill. I haven’t been roasting long, so it’s not saying much to say I don’t know what I’m doing. However, I suspect that this will be the case months maybe even years from now. Coffee roasting is not my profession nor will it ever be. In the copious amount of research I did preparing to roast at home, I’ve learned there’s not only a science to roasting but an art to it. The art only comes from experience, creativity and innovation. I’m under no illusions that what I’m roasting is up to par with what a specialty coffee shop sells for $20/bag.

That said, I’m confident I can get to the point where I can reliably produce coffee good enough for the tastes of all the coffee-drinkers in my household and our occasional guests. And that’s good enough for me.

Equipment & Storage. The little roaster I have is pretty small and doesn’t take a lot of room. But I also invested in other stuff that resulted in clearing out an entire section of cabinet space. I’m sure as my passion and experience grows, the equipment list and storage needs may grow with it. It’s a small price to pay for fantastic coffee!

At the end of the day, home roasting has increased my appreciation for a bag of roasted whole beans. Suddenly, the cost of freshly roasted beans is not only fair for the coffee roaster but very worth it as a consumer. If budget is a factor, the occasional fresh-roasted bag of coffee beans is hands down better than grocery store bought coffee any day. Well worth it if ever home roasting loses its allure.

My Initial Coffee Roasting Investment

To wrap up, here’s a rundown of my initial $500 investment. You can certainly get by with less and there plenty of ways to spend more if you let yourself.

• $180 – FreshRoast SR500 – good entry level roaster and even among the FreshRoast line it’s not their most expensive
• $120 – Bean Storage – this included a vacuum sealer (which will come in handy for other uses), degassing containers/bags, mason jars, etc. for storing green and roasted beans
• $120 – Green beans – this is probably where I went a little nutty and overbought. I tried to stick to a 6 month supply. It’s what lead me to the extra storage equipment as a precaution.
• $80 – Accessories – I invested in a thermocouple & thermometer so I can track my bean temperature while roasting. I want to mix in some science while I learn the art. I also got a decent quality coffee scale & timer combo. It can measure down to the 1/10 gram and has a built-in timer. Primarily I use it to measure my espresso extraction time and yield. But it’s also useful to measure my espresso dosing as well as my roasting batch size (before and after the roast).

Honestly, I could have gotten by just fine on less than half this cost. The coffee roaster and 8 lbs of free green beans from the vendor would have been enough. On the flip side, I could have easily spent twice as much, so on the whole I feel good about this initial investment.

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DISCLAIMER: The information and advice I offer on this site are 100% from my own experience, understanding and independent research. I encourage you to do your own research, form your own opinions and practice your own strategies. Please share what works with the community.