Tag Archive for 'roast your own coffee beans'

Roasting coffee

Bob has been roasting our coffee beans for nearly ten years.  It’s sort of a money-saving venture because green beans cost less than half of roasted beans, and they stay fresh at room temperature for years. 

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This is Bob’s coffee drawer.   He has a few ten lb bags of green beans, and two jars of freshly roast coffee.  He says that after the beans are roasted, they need to stay in a jar for three days for optimal flavor development. 

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This is our current home roaster, the i-Roast 2.  This roaster costs $180, and they don’t last that long.   We’re on our third roaster in ten years, and we just drink one or two cups a day.  Roasting your own coffee saves a little money but not a lot.  The real draw is choosing your green beans.

When I pull up the list of beans from sweetmarias.com, sure enough the first thing I see is a coffee grown by Guyami indians in Central America that is pulped in a creek and paddled downriver by canoe.  Our last batch of beans came from a small farmer in Rwanda, and I practically knew the name of his cow.   This part of the global economy, that allows me to support a Rwandan farmer directly from Durango–I like it.