busybee Food Coffee Talk

I finally tried out a roast I’d been looking forward to, a medium-light roast of Burman Colombian Las Montanas, an EA-decaf natural process coffee. This is one of those coffees that tasted so good I just had to record my notes for later.

I used the following roast profile on the Popper*:

1. 6:00 at 980 watts
2. 1:00 at 1140 watts (at which it barely reached first crack)
3. 3:00 cooling cycle

And then it rested for 8 days. The overall mass loss was 10.3%, classifying it as “first crack” according to Sweet Maria’s chart.

The resulting espresso shot was flavorful with a nice level of acid, fruity flavor, a slightly syrupy texture, and a bit of natural sweetness.

As much as I was enjoying my cheap home-roasting setup, the coffee I was getting out of it was a bit one-note, especially when doing processes which were easily-replicable. The best coffee I’d gotten was when I didn’t know what I was doing and was trying all sorts of random things.

After reading up a bunch more about what I was doing wrong, all conclusions were that having the popper going at full-blast from the beginning was really limiting my ability to get good, consistent, developed roasts, and after considering adding a PID controller to my popper or other means of temperature control, I decided the easiest next step would be to buy a Popper¹.

I love the flavor of coffee, but don’t really care much for caffeine. Unfortunately, finding good roasters that treat decaffeinated coffee with respect is difficult, and the ones which are out there tend to either default to a dark roast, or cost enormous amounts.

But with a $20 popcorn air popper you can roast your own coffee at home, and save a lot of money doing it!

I’ve been doing it.