In this block every week I am answering 3 of the most popular questions about specialty coffee.
This week we gonna continue exploring the topic of home coffee roasting, the one that we started last week – with the questions “How do you roast coffee at home?”, “How long does it take to roast coffee?”, “What are the best coffee roasters for home?” and “Is it worth roasting your own coffee?”.
(Check out the category “common questions” for the previous posts, where we talked about arabica and robusta, caffeine, coffee tree and many others)
This week we are talking about….
What temperature do you roast coffee at?
Depending on a coffee roaster design, the bean and exhaust air temperature can differ, but the average maximum temperatures are: bean temperature – 202ºC, exhaust air temperature (temperature of the air around the bean mass) – 240ºC.
Here it is important to mention that after reading that information we should make a conclusion that it is physically impossible to burn the coffee beans in a coffee machine, where the temperatures are not raising higher than 100ºC. Beans already went through much higher temperatures before.
Can you roast coffee in the oven? How do you roast coffee in the oven?
No, and yes. Yes, because the coffee will indeed brown, but no – because what you gonna be doing is baking coffee, not roasting it. Due to the lack of air moving in the oven, temperature control, and the direction of the heat coffee will turn out tasting bland. If you are thinking about home roasting with budget equipment, check out the list of coffee roasters I posted here. The best and cheapest way to start is to actually use ceramic ibrik.
Is it cheaper to roast your own coffee?
It may seem so, but in the most cases no. But it is lots of fun though!
First you need to consider the fact that are going to make an investment, buying a small home coffee roaster. The second issue is buying green beans – before investing in roaster, check out if you have a green bean supplier around, that sells beans to the individual customer. Although such companies do exist, in most of the cases the green bean importers are working only with the companies.
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