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Winter Home Roastingby Ryan Jacobs Page 1 | Page 2 In the article Roast Your Own, I showed you how easy it is to home roast coffee using a popcorn popper, but I didn't mention the popper roaster's nemesis: Old Man Winter. Cold winds and bitter temperatures have a negative impact on outdoor roasting in a popper. Coffee roasting requires a high temperature and when the cold winds start whipping around the machine, the coffee beans are cooled. The lower the roast temperature, the longer the roast will take. There are many good aspects of slow roasted coffee, but cold temperatures can be deadly to your roasting efforts. Simply put: if the roast gets too cold and takes too long the final result will be unpalatable coffee. The ChallengeShould we give up on home roasting during the winter? Should we deprive ourselves of fresh home roasted coffee? NO! My goal was to devise a method to fight off the cold temperatures and to roast great-tasting coffee. For this article I had a fellow roaster in San Diego, California roast the exact same type of coffee bean as I roasted in Columbus, Ohio. Could I get the same roasting times in a sub-freezing environment as I could on a sunny day in California?
A Ruined BatchTo demonstrate what it is like trying to roast coffee in the cold without modifying the environment or popper, I did a sample batch, taking pictures along the way. As you can see from the pictures, trying to roast without controlling the environmental factors was disasterous. Extremely cold weather is just too much for this little popper to handle. It can't heat the ambient cold air fast enough to roast the coffee beans effectively.
The result was completely unacceptable. By the 11 minute mark, these coffee beans were unevenly roasted and they had only reached a cinnamon roast. The roast was uninspiring and I knew better than to brew and taste the lifeless coffee. But even more unacceptable to me was the notion that I could not roast during the winter. I decided to modify the roasting conditions in an effort to control the ambiant temperature. Page 1 | Page 2 |
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