How To Roast Your Own Coffee at Home

Do the coffee superpowers have roasting secrets? Do they have recipes, ingredients, or equipment not available to you or me? No. The only thing you need to turn green coffee into roast coffee is heat. Anyone with a fry pan and two sticks to rub together has the necessary equipment.

What’s all the fuss then about roasting coffee? Why the multimillion-dollar investments in computerized roasting equipment by Big Coffee?

It’s a bit like the bottled water industry. At home you can turn on your tap, and out flows potable water. There’s no magic to filling an 8-ounce glass.

However, if you want to sell millions of bottles of water you need to build factories, design an elaborate filtering and bottling process and set up a distribution system. All this to charge two dollars for what comes relatively free out of your tap.

Likewise, if you want to sell billions of dollars worth of coffee, you need to build factories, design an elaborate roasting and bottling process and set up a distribution system. All this to sell beans for $10-12.00 per pound that only cost $1.50 originally. What value was added to the beans to earn their 1000% profit? Basically, heat.

And, while water has a shelf life measured in years, roasted coffee’s shelf life is less than a week and is at its prime in the first 24 hours. Unless you have a neighborhood roaster, the coffee you are buying is probably a week or two past its prime by the time you get it home.

So, in order for you to save money and have the freshest coffee possible, I offer these few simple steps to start you off roasting your own coffee.

1. Get some green coffee. 
2. Grab a frying pan.
3. Turn on the heat.
4. Throw in the beans.
5. Stir until they look like coffee.
6. Remove from heat and cool your beans down.
7. Grind, brew and drink.

This will probably not be the best cup of coffee you’ve had this year. It will, however, show you just how easy it is to roast coffee and encourage you to think about how to make it better.

So where can you buy the green beans? There are a number of online sources for green (un-roasted) coffee. You won’t be able to pay the same price Big Coffee pays for their beans, unless you purchase 37,500 lbs. at a time (that is how much a coffee futures contract controls). But you will be able to find a huge assortment of beans from every coffee growing region in the world at prices well below pre-roasted. A typical online sampler of four different 1/2 lb. packs costs about $10.00.

Keep in mind that coffee roasting is an art and training your senses to identify signs of the perfect roast will produce great coffee. What does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it smell like? And, most importantly, what does it taste like?

Once you’ve developed a general feel for roasting -- something you can only do by watching the process in the pan -- there are a number of other roasting methods to explore. Home roasters have been very successful with stovetop popcorn poppers and electric hot-air popcorn poppers. And, of course, there are a number of highly capable electric coffee roasters made just for the home.

By starting with little more than a handful of beans, you may never settle for pre-roasted coffee again.