The Arrival & First Roast

About three weeks ago I picked up a new magazine from Wild Oats called Imbibe Magazine. It is an excellent read about many of my long standing passions: beer, liquor, coffee, food, entertaining, etc. One of the articles in the December issue discusses home coffee roasting. From that moment on (for the last two weeks anyway) I have been hooked on the idea of roasting coffee at home.

I spent the next couple of weeks researching home coffee roasters, green coffee beans and the roasting process. Eventually I made the jump and placed an order with Sweet Maria's for everything that I would need to get started the right way.

So far, I have found Sweet Maria's to be an excellent resource. They have extensive right ups on many coffee roasters, in depth reviews of green beans and the encouragement that I could roast a fine cup of coffee at home.


My package arrived on Monday, December 17. I ordered the i-Roast 2 from Hearthware, a digital scale, a digital thermometer, a timer, the 8 1/2 pound sample back and 5 additional pounds of green beans (not pictured). I was set and ready to go.

I was a little concerned about the smoke that I had read so much about, so I also ran to Home Depot and picked up a 4" dryer exhaust hose. After carefully reading all of the literature that came with my package, I decided upon a strategy and set up shop. You can see my make-shift venting system is not a great permanent solution, but I just wanted to start roasting. I'll have to come up with something better later.

I started with the Mexico Organic Nayarit Terruno green beans. I typically like my coffee roasted a little darker to provide a more bold cup, so I decided to use the preset 2 roasting cycle that comes programmed on the i-Roast 2--the roast cycle is stated to be:
Stage 1 455 degrees for 6 minutes
Stage 2 400 degrees for 4 minutes
Stage 3 435 degrees for 1:30 minutes

I carefully weighed out exactly 130 grams of the hard green beans and poured them into the chamber. I ran the on board thermometer into the chamber so I could measure the actual temperature versus the programmed temperature. The notes included on Sweet Maria's web site states that the actual on board temp may be as many as 40-50 degrees lower than the programmed temp; however, on later versions of the i-Roast the temperatures more closely match.

Here are my notes from the first roast:
1 min on board temp reads 241 degrees

1.30 beans are already starting to turn a straw-yellow color

2 min 327 degrees beans are fully yellowed and starting to turn a light tan color (pictured below)

2.40 starting to notice loose chaff in the chamber

3 min 391 degrees

3.30 consistent brown color

3.38 audible signs of first crack

4 min 437 degrees, first crack continues

4.30 beans are noticeably dark, it sounds like first crack continues--does it go on this long??

5 min 487 degrees, first signs of oils are showing on the beans, still cracking?

5.30 beans are significantly larger in size and extremely oily. The look very dark at this point, I think they are done, but the pre-roast is set for 11.30 minutes, they can't possibly be done.

6 min 528 degrees - this sucker is hot!

6.13 I can't take it any more and hit the manual cool down button.

7 min 356 degrees

7.30 275 degrees

8 min 218 degrees

9 min 155 degrees

10 min 130 degrees

10.11 my first batch of beans are complete! My first inclination is that they are burned, but I tell myself that I like a dark roast. I move them to a metal rack with holes to continue the cooling process to bring them to room temperature. The beans look a lot darker than in the picture, at least an esspresso roast or darker.