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Episode: 3563
Title: HPR3563: Home Coffee Roasting, part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3563/hpr3563.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 01:27:19
---
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3563 for Wednesday the 30th of March 2022.
Today's show is entitled Home Coffee Roasting Part 1.
It is hosted Biden and is about 19 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is what it's like to roast coffee at home.
Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
This is DNT.
So after recording this in the edit, I decided to split it into two episodes.
So this is going to be two episodes about home coffee roasting, which is when you buy
a green coffee in a kind of a fairly small amount, and you roast it yourself at home.
So the first episode, this one, will be kind of generally about coffee and home coffee
roasting, coffee roasting in general.
And then in Part 2, I will talk specifically about how I have roasted coffee and how I
roast coffee today, and also brewing, talk a little bit about that too.
All right, and here's the recording.
This one is going to be an episode about coffee, specifically about home coffee roasting.
Also I'll note that I'm recording this using solo cast from Todd Norris, I'll put the link
in the show notes to the episode where he introduced this Python script that helps you
record an episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm planning it really interesting, and this is the first episode I'm recording using
solo cast.
So the first question that may come to mind is why roast coffee at home.
There can be a lot of reasons for you to do that.
So one option is it can be cheaper, a little cheaper than buying coffee already roasted.
Maybe not as cheap as you might expect, not as much cheaper as you might expect, but
it's definitely cheaper, especially if you'll buy good quality coffee, roasted coffee.
One thing that I like too is that you don't have to be buying coffee all the time because
the green coffee keeps for quite a lot longer than roasted coffee.
So for example, I order coffee, maybe about 10 pounds of coffee, once every two or three
months, and I say 10 pounds of coffee, that's green coffee, so it weighs about twice as
much as it does after you roast it, so that probably means about 5 pounds of roasted coffee
is what I go through here in two or three months.
So another thing that I find really important is that when you buy a green coffee, a larger
share of the money you pay for, it is going to the growers back in the growing countries.
And I think that's, yeah, I've seen some graphs about how much of the money you pay for
a cup of coffee at a coffee shop in a country like the United States, and yeah, of course
most of it goes to the coffee shop, which is fine, but when it comes to the roasting,
a lot of the money goes to the roaster, and only a very small portion goes back to the
farmer in the producing country, and I and many others believe that the highest impact
on the cup is actually made at the farm, not at roasting.
Basically one way you can look at it is that in the roast you can certainly ruin a good
coffee, but you can't save a bad coffee, you know.
So that's a good reason for me because I am from a country, from a coffee producing country.
So I do care about making sure that the coffee, the countries that are providing coffee
to the world are being paid well for it.
So where to buy green coffee then?
I learned about this place called Sweetmourius.
I had kind of heard about people roasting coffee at home, but never gave him much attention.
Then someone my wife met at her job, he was handing out bags of coffee that he had roasted
at home, and then he mentioned he bought it.
He bought the green coffee at Sweetmourius, and then that's how I entered this rabbit hole.
So Sweetmourius, I'm company I'm quite fond of, they put good stuff on their website
for you to read in addition to the stuff you buy from them.
They also sell a lot of coffee equipment, so it's kind of like they endorse it, you know,
they sell things and they kind of explain why they think it's good, like stuff for brewing
coffee, or storing coffee, just anything to do with coffee basically.
As I mentioned in my most recent episode, they have a podcast, the Occasionally Post
too, and those are quite good too.
The owner, whose name is Tom, he records about his trips to coffee producing countries,
and those are often pretty nice.
I remember one, he was in Ethiopia, and we could hear some of the background noise and stuff.
And yeah, it's just, I mean, it's people I've enjoyed listening to.
They post also regularly, they post an article that they call the Coffee Outlook, in which
they kind of outline what coffees are coming in, and they make some comments about it too,
so I kind of like to learn some about the coffee industry around the world, the exporting
of it, etc.
It's also cool because then, like, you know, they sell some blends, but most of what they
sell are single origin coffees, which means just one coffee from one country or region.
So then it's kind of like, for example, I remember about a year ago, maybe a year and
a half ago, I bought this one coffee that they call Guatemala with the Nango Boqueroncito.
I shared it with people, and yeah, just people were just blown away.
It was one of those coffees that you, it's one, a lot of people imagine all your coffee
must taste like if you roast your own coffee at home, but it's not true, only sometimes
it does.
So then yeah, you see that one, and like it came maybe from a farm or from a cooperative
in a region of Guatemala, and then you can kind of watch for it in the next season when
they're going to get a new harvest from that same region or cooperative, or whatever
it is.
You can kind of keep an eye on that outlook, and then as soon as it gets in, or they're
more, if you like to, right?
Also they had an article about Zimbabwe coffee, which was pretty interesting, I'm talking
about the Zimbabwe coffee industry of many years ago, in like political turmoil in the
country, how it affected in the coffee industry, et cetera, is one of those, like someone
who's been working in the coffee industry for many years will have this kind of observation
and they're sharing this in this article.
I'll put it link in the show notes as well for you to have a look.
And then another thing I'll mention is the, I guess I'm not sure how to pronounce it,
but it's spelled C-I-N-I, but so I'm going to say scenic cups.
So these were supposed to be our cup.
It's like the cup that people drink coffee out of in Ethiopia, and Tom had seen it in Ethiopia
many times, and then he was able to secure some to sell from his company.
And they're just these little coffee cups that he says everywhere in Ethiopia, where
you buy a coffee, it'll be served in a cup just like that.
So yeah, I don't know, I just find it interesting, I ordered some and they're cool.
So what is green coffee like?
Green coffee is like a muted green, and I would describe that it's quite a lot smaller
than roasted coffee, and it smells like nature, I would say, it smells like a little bit
like grass or something like that.
So that can allow for some enjoyment, and taking a coffee from somewhere really far away,
and just smelling it, and thinking about how you're smelling somehow the land or the
nature of that place.
And then I'll talk about decaf coffee too quickly.
So decaf coffee looks kind of brown, it looks quite different, and it smells like malt.
It's not a very pleasant smell when it's not roasted.
This decaf coffee I'm talking about, it's the one that's produced through a method that's
called Swiss water process, everybody hates decaf coffee, but actually there are some
newer techniques for removing caffeine from coffee that are actually quite good.
And then, yeah, after sometime I actually tried it, and I ordered a couple of decaf
coffees from them, made with this Swiss water process, and yeah, it's true, it's really
good.
You know, this decaf coffee can taste even better than a bad regular coffee in truth.
So yeah, what they do is they just take some coffee, some regular coffee, and they send
it to this company that removes the caffeine for them using this process, and then sends
it back to them.
And yeah, they say, you know, one thing with decaf coffee is like, you're never going
to send your best coffee to be decafinated.
So by that alone, it's not going to be as good as regular coffee, of course, but, you
know, as an option, if you're sensitive to caffeine or something like that, it's definitely
decent.
And yeah, having tried it, I absolutely agree.
I have been buying, I have always been having one regular coffee and one decaf coffee.
And then most days, what I've done is I'll just start the day with one regular espresso,
and then for the rest of the day, I'll drink half-calf, which is just half regular coffee
and half decaf.
So you get less caffeine in the cup.
And yeah, it's pretty good.
So when you roast the coffee, there's something that's called chaff.
Then if you start roasting coffee at home, you will be very familiar with it.
This is like this skin that's, like, a little bit of, like, pulp or something of the flesh
of the chair of the coffee cherry, that when you roast it, it dries out and it just flies
off, right?
It's like it's invisible in the green coffee, but when you roast it, it appears.
And it can make a bit of a mess.
When you're roasting, it's definitely one of the more inconvenient things about roasting
coffee yourself.
Decaf coffee, of course, since it's been processed in water, it doesn't have any chaff.
So when you're roasted, no chaff comes off.
Regular coffee, you have mostly two main types of processing for coffee.
So it's like, you know, they pick the coffee and then they process it in mostly in one
of two ways.
And those two ways are called dry process or wet process.
And basically, they're the ways of kind of removing the flesh so that you get down to
the beans, the two beans that come in each coffee cherry.
And that can be the wet process is like you wash it in various different ways.
And then it removes the most of the flesh.
And that process doesn't remove more material.
So you get less chaff when you're roasting a wet process coffee.
And a dry process coffee is usually, it's just picked and then it's just laid out on
a patio and left to dry.
So and then after that, usually you process it in some kind of a mill to kind of break
the dried up flesh off.
So you can imagine with this, you get a lot more material left on the bean and that
material will later when you're roasting it will come off.
So other differences between wet and dry process coffee are wet processes supposed to remove
certain kinds of flavors from the coffee.
So dry process coffees are generally thought to have more dried fruit flavors, more fruity.
Kind of like most of the time, the coffee that kind of tastes kind of crazy, kind of wild,
like, you know, someone who's not used to it might be even surprised it is coffee.
Those kinds of coffees are a lot of times their dry process coffee.
So they keep a lot of like what you might call rustic aromas or whatever.
So they can be pretty good.
That's definitely an interesting, like if you see a really dry process coffee that's described
in really interesting terms, yeah, it can be kind of fun.
And yeah, I'll show also, I'll put it in the show notes to just to one coffee at Sweet
Maria.
So you can see how they kind of rate and describe each coffee that they sell, especially
I like the wheel with several different kind of criteria.
That's kind of mostly what I look at.
And I mostly look for a coffee that's rated high on sweetness, citrus, citrus and sweetness.
I think for me are our favorites.
But who knows, it's all super subjective.
You know, you just buy and you try it and see what it tastes like and then go on to
the next one.
Like I said before, a lot of people when they hear that you roast coffee at home, they
react like, oh, you know, coffee must be really amazing.
But, you know, no, not necessarily.
Like, you know, if I decide that I'm going to make chairs at home, are you going to think
I'm going to be making the best chairs in the world?
No.
You know, it's the same with coffee.
Because it's very good and sometimes it's not that good.
So now for roast levels, so yeah, a lot of people will say, oh, I like dark roast.
I do not like dark roast.
So dark roast is usually, it's like you obliterate the origin aromas that are in your coffee
and you kind of replace them with just roast aromas, right?
You know, usually you roast coffees more to make it more kind of consistent.
So you can bunch together a bunch of different coffees that have been processed, maybe in
different ways.
Some of them are maybe not as well, haven't been as well processed by the farms.
You just bunch them all together and then roast them to a certain level where you kind
of just even it all out.
That's kind of what roasting does.
So if you have a good coffee, most likely, I think you're going to want to roast a little
lighter.
But then again, that's me.
I do hear about a lot of coffees where from Sweden, where yes, for example, where they
recommend roasting darker, roasting to a darker level than I mostly do because it's supposed
to bring out certain different notes.
But yeah, I don't know, I roast a little lighter usually.
So another thing, when you're roasting coffee, there's what's called the first crack and
the second crack.
So this is an audible cracking of the coffee beans and it's caused by something to do with
CO2 escaping from the bean with so much force that it cracks the flesh of the bean.
So the first crack, it's kind of the marker where you're supposed to start watching your
roast because once it goes through the first crack, once you first start hearing it crack,
it means it's kind of okay to drink from that point on and then you just decide what level
you want.
So the first crack sounds, supposedly sounds kind of like popcorn, I'm going to put a little
audio clip here after this showing you in my roaster what the first crack sounds like.
I'll usually wait until the first crack kind of ends where it's cracking and then it's
cracking a lot and then it'll kind of subside for a while and usually I cut it off at
that point and I have a cool.
And then there's also the second crack which is very dark, if your coffee goes all the
way to second crack, your coffee is going to be very dark so I almost never get there.
And the second crack is supposed to sound more like rice crispy treats when you put milk
on them.
You know, it's like a softer popping and it's a lot more popping you hear.
And it's going to be smoking like crazy at that point.
So that's the second crack you're basically after second crack you're just making charcoal.
If you take your coffee out right when it starts cracking it's probably not going to be
very good.
You probably need to let it crack for a while.
I like the point I do.
And there are names for all these roast levels but I don't know too much about that.
Alright that was part one of my two part episode about home coffee roasting.
In two weeks time I will talk about how I have roasted coffee, how I started, how I do
it today, and also some about how I brew coffee.
If you don't want to wait you can just go to the future feed and find the other episode
there as I will post these both at the same time.
Alright, thank you for joining us and come back tomorrow for another exciting episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
Bye bye.
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