Home Roasted Coffee

Every now and then I like to take the time to roast my own coffee beans. My dad told stories of roasting coffee beans in a big frying pan so I always thought it would be something different to try. Knowing this, my son had bought me a few packs of "green coffee" from a friend at work (he was running a wholesale business on the side). When my son changed jobs I lost my "supplier" so I hadn't roasted in a while.

During a recent trip to Tanzania, I found myself in a huge, open air market on the hunt for green coffee beans. Tanzania is known for its coffee, so I absolutely had to get some.
  

Coffee beans from Tanzania—roasted and unroasted (bagged)

I roasted these in my air popcorn popper. I burnt out a previous popper by roasting beans in it, so if you intend on doing a lot of roasting, you may be better off investing in a coffee roaster Usually when you do this, you get tons of flying chaff that separates from the bean. It doesn't smell too nice!

For the Tanzanian beans, however the chaff didn't fly off and I resolved myself to "hand shedding" each bean. What a friggin pain! 

Removing some of the chaff by hand...

I gave up on that task and after checking out a couple of blogs that stated you could grind your beans with the chaff left on. I went ahead and ground em up.

The taste was quite good. Not too mild—something that I worry about when home roasting beans. They almost had a chocolate flavour.

Good news is that you don't have to go to Africa to get your green coffee. There is a supplier in Almonte, Ontario (Equator Coffee) that sells unroasted beans online.