MemeMachineGo!

I’d seen mention of roasting your own coffee with a hot air popcorn popper.

At the beginning of March, Pocahontas and I visited Hawaii’s Big Island. While we were there, we toured a coffee farm, and drank a lot of Kona coffee. It really is better than most coffee I’ve had, but the price is prohibitive in the continental U.S. One of the things the tour guide said was that green coffee beans keep for a couple of years — it’s roasting that gives coffee a short shelf life.

Which is one of the reasons that green beans are cheaper. So much cheaper as to make Kona feasible.

So we found one and a half popcorn poppers at a yard sale for $3 — the half popper was missing its hood, which is fine for coffee roasting. We kept the whole one for actual popcorn popping (we’d both forgotten how much better and easier hot air popping is than old-fashioned popping in oil.) We found a green bean seller in Oakland, and bought a sampler of 8 half-pounds of different varieties. I modded our popper per directions for the model, and we began roasting our own coffee.

The various warnings on the web lead one to expect plumes of stinky black smoke, even cautioning one to wear old clothes you don’t mind stinking of coffee. Doing a tiny batch outside, there wasn’t much in the way of smoke or stink. We just guessed as to how long, watching the beans for color. After somewhere in the neighborhood of five minutes for 1/3 of a cup (raw — they increase in volume as they roast) we were done.

The advice on the web was to wait at least 12 hours before making coffee with them, so we waited till the next morning to try it.

It was fantastic. With a yard sale popcorn popper, a regular coffee grinder, my aeropress, green coffee beans, and time, I’m drinking the best coffee I’ve ever had, for less money than we’d been paying for roasted beans from Peet’s.

We still haven’t tried roasting our own Kona. It gets hard to imagine our coffee getting any better.

And we totally got this Final Jeopardy clue.