Home Coffee Roasters
There a number of different roasters. Each roasts coffee beans differently. StoveTop Roasting You’ll need a gas stove for this one to do it properly and a crank style popcorn popper or you can use just a cast iron skillet or a heavy frying pan. You put the pan or roaster on the burner, weigh your beans (up to 8 ounces), pour them into the pan and crank them to make sure the beans are evenly distributed and not piled up in one area. Keep up the cranking throughout the entire roast at least every 30 seconds or your beans will burn. Then turn up the burner to medium and start your timer. After 5-10 minutes the beans start to pop. When all the beans of popped there will be a brief silence before they start to crackle and hiss. Open the hatch and check your beans. When they reach the color you want for your brew take them off the heat and put them into a metal colander to cool. Drum Roasting A drum constantly rotates while hot air passes into the chamber of the drum which means that each bean is evenly heated. The cylindrical chamber is perforated and the hot air comes into it from below while another stream of hot air is blown through the center of the cylinder sort of like a convection oven. This is the main method used by commercial roasters but home models are also available. Fluid Air Roasting Unlike drum roasters the hot air under the beans makes them “float”. It lifts them up so they are suspended on the air kind of like a pop corn popper and some people use pop corn poppers to roast coffee beans. |
