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Buying Expensive Coffee Beans? Here’s How to Take Care of Them
If you’re a fan of high-end coffee, you probably get most of your favorite drinks at a gourmet coffee shop. But those gourmet coffees can eventually start to get pretty expensive when you’ve got a daily habit, so you may opt to save money by buying your own high-end coffee beans and making your gourmet coffee at home instead.
It’s a simple matter to grind coffee beans and put them into a coffee maker to make coffee, and the savings can be substantial. But if you really want to make the perfect cup of coffee – the one that tastes just right to you – you’re going to have to roast your own coffee beans at home.
How to Roast Your Own Coffee Beans
In the dark ages, people roasted their own coffee beans the way you cook anything else: they put them in a pan and held them over heat. Today, home roasting methods are a little more sophisticated.
In fact, there are home roasters that enable you to get the maximum amount of flavor out of your bean, and allow you to adjust the roasting process to get the flavor you’re looking for from those high-end beans. Some of the options on the market include the following items.
Nesco Professional
This roaster looks like a coffee maker, with a visible drum so you can watch the beans as they roast. While it is a nice-looking machine that can be fun to use, it is fairly loud, and you can’t adjust it to a special setting to accommodate for high-end beans. You simply have to know how long you want to roast your beans.
The Behmor 1600
This roaster actually resembles your toaster, but inside, rather than a grill for your bread, lies a rotating drum and chaff collector. The nice thing about this machine is that you can set it for high-end beans and your favorite type of roast, and it will heat the beans for just the right amount of time.
You’ll want to pre-heat the machine, but only for a minute or it will get too hot to load the beans. Once the coffee beans are roasted, just press the cool button to cool them down inside the oven so you can take them out for grinding.
Hottop
If you’re working with very high-end beans and are looking for the ultimate coffee flavor, you may want to invest in a Hottop. These roasters, which look sort of like rotisseries and are in fact modeled after large commercial roasters, consist of an electric coil-heated rotating drum.
You can set it to auto roast and allow the machine to manage the heat levels, or you can program it manually, controlling how long your beans are heated at each level and how fast the fan exhaust runs. You can even watch the beans through the glass window as they change color, as well as see the temperature live throughout the process.
The only real downside to this machine, other than the cost, is that it generates a lot of smoke, even with the fan running. While this may make your home smell entirely like great coffee, you may find the smoke a bit overpowering, so run this machine near an open window. You may also want to have a powerful fan at the ready to blow the smoke away.
Mastering the roasting of your own coffee may not happen for you the first time out, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll love being able to create your ideal flavor consistently at home, for a lot less money.