We all know that brewing your own coffee at home is a no-brainer in terms of saving money. But if you roast your own coffee, you can save even more! Especially if you enjoy single origin, fair trade, organic etc etc.
You can buy unroasted "green" coffee beans for $5-8 per pound from a distributor such as SweetMarias. When roasting, you lose ~15% to water weight, so the effective cost becomes $5.75-9.25. And this is for something like a single origin, organic, cooperative-grown, fair trade Ethiopian coffee. Easily retails for $20/lb, for an over-roasted, charcoal-tasting bean!
How do you roast, you ask? There are many different ways. The easiest is to use a hot air popcorn popper. I bought mine for $5 from GoodWill. It takes less than 5 minutes to roast one batch. The only downside is you can only roast ~3 brewed cups worth of coffee beans at one time. But because it's so quick, you can just make it a morning or evening task if you are a coffee addict. For larger batch sizes, people put the beans in a bucket and use a heat gun to stir and roast the beans en masse (many videos on youtube). You can also rig up a drum roaster that hooks up to a rotisserie to go into your gas grill, or even roast in a cast iron skillet on the stovetop (lots of stirring required). The internet abounds with home-made roasting methods!
April 24, 2017 at 12:34PM
