Do you roast your own coffee beans?

That’s funny, ’cause I think that’s exactly what I just got a coupla days ago.

In one form, or another, they’ve been around for a hundred years, or so.

Good stuff IMO and even better on a BOGO deal.

Chris

since LumenMax posted: “…buy roasted beans in bulk and freeze most once the package arrives.”…
how long do the frozen beans remain “good enough” to make coffee you would actually want to drink?

Yeh, I remember as a kid, mum getting 8:00 at the local A&P.

Measure out the beans from a huge hopper, put ’em through the industrial-strength grinding machine, and right into an empty bag loaded up under the spout.

No such thing as grinding ’em at home back then, so that was as close to fresh-ground as anyone could get.

It’s still a commodity coffee, not “gourmet” or “specialty” or anything, but they’re good enough for me.

Thanks everyone for chiming in. Great to know that there’s coffee nerds on BLF, or just folks who have enjoyed doing home coffee bean roasting. Good stuff here, walking away with more knowledge. I’m definitely encouraged to give it a go. Maybe I can find a used iRoast or similar locally and grab one just for a cheap entry point into doing home roasting.

I find Eight O’Clock Peaks is pretty decent, for the price. I don’t know if “Signature Select” is exclusive to ACME, but I discovered their beans recently. Their medium roast (with the Indian woman graphic on it) is really quite decent. Before the supply chain probs you could get a 2 lb bag for $10! Now it’s up to $15.

Nobody who’s into coffee freezes their coffee.

Chris

Then I stand alone on top of my castle of frozen beans, holding a bottomless portafilter in the air.

Don’t trust me and just Google it.

Or better yet, just roast in smaller batches and drink it. Then start the process over.

Chris

I find the beans themselves make more of a difference than freezing. Fresh is best, of course, but to save $, I buy in bulk and for me, it works well enough. Try buying 1lb of your favorite beans and freezing a small bag. Try the frozen beans next day and then try them again in a month. See if you can tell the difference.

Coffee machine: Rocket Espresso R58

Grinder: Compak K6

Drink: Cortados

Beans: 5lb bags of Stumptown Hair Bender, Redbird Ethiopian Aricha, Storyville Prologue, etc. Stumptown Hair Bender beans do well in the freezer.

Not an issue of trust. It's a matter of time and economy. I prefer fresh, of course, but freezing is fine for me.

Almost everyone drinks coffee that’s burned to a crisp, and they like it that way. If you give them specialty coffee that’s been recently roasted and with a proper level of roast, they won’t like it. They are so used to the burned flavor that they think that’s what coffee should taste like. A “medium roast” from the grocery store is darker than any specialty roaster will ever roast their beans. Specialty coffee is always dry in appearance, the beans do not appear oily, because it is not roasted to that degree.

The shelf life is not so critical as people in this thread are claiming. If you get coffee that was roasted within the week, and then it takes you a month to consume it, it’ll still taste good at that point.

I consumed farm direct Kona for about 5 years straight but in the last several years I’ve been trying specialty coffee from a few select roasters. Specialty beans are sold by the pallet at auction. A little tip for how to get the best coffee in the world: go to these auction websites and see who is listed as winning the auctions. Buy beans from them.

This is what drove me to start home roasting in 1985; Coffees were roasted too dark for my taste!
An oily sheen on the bean is the tell tale of a dark roast. The cell structure of the bean has been fractured and the oils released. These beans will go rancid faster than a medium or light roast because the oils are exposed.

My preference is mostly for a medium roast for espresso. ‘Full City’, fully developed body, and roast flavors (like chocolate and nut) but preserving the more subtle origin flavors (such as fruit and floral notes). This is the roast zone after ‘first crack’ and before ‘second crack’ begins.

I’m not sure why the dark roast has been so promoted except that it will be easier to produce a consistent flavor profile and you can also hide the flavor defects of lower quality beans.

To quote Thomson Owen of Sweet Marias; “Coffee is a crop, not a can of pop!” Consistency from crop to crop should not be expected.

If you are a mass coffee producer and you want a consistent flavor year after year, roasting so dark that all the distinctive character is lost is one way to do it! And you can easily get by with lower cost and quality commodity beans.

Today we have much more choice in roasting styles thanks to all the variety of artisan roasters. You can find super light nordic style roasts like what Tim Wendelboe has championed (that barely taste like coffee!) all the way to the charred remains like some that Charbucks and Peet’s are still doing.

I try to draw analogy with other foods and cooking but they all fall short as the complexity of flavor development chemistry of coffee is like nothing else! But we have all toasted bread, and probably burned it black as well! Think of the flavor differences between a perfectly golden brown and a blackened piece of toast. One is sweet with caramel and browning flavor while the burnt toast is bitter and acrid.

Look at all the flavor differences you can get by cooking an onion differently from the raw hot and pungent (analogy fail here as green coffee beans are in no way palatable!) to a soft sweet fully caramelized French onion soup. If you blackened the onion here it will be bitter not sweet and you may as well toss it and start over!

The other part of home roasting besides always having fresh roasted coffee is being able to source the green beans you like during the crop harvest cycle and then roasting them to your own preferred taste! It’s just another home cooking culinary experience! Great flavor rewards here!

I also like to bake bread. Compare fresh bread out of the oven to week old store bought mass produced bread.

Yeah, I always compare overly-roasted coffee as “tasting like an ashtray”.

I once made the mistake of getting oily beans. Vile. Clogged up my grinder and made it a beeyotch to clean. Was glad when I choked down the last of it and got new.

Everything I’ve read thus far points to never freezing… because the extreme cold sucks moisture out of the beans, and that’s the last thing you want to happen.

Well said. Roasting coffee is just a special case of roasting anything that contains proteins and sugars. As you raise the temperature you’ll progress through drying, Maillard reactions, caramelization, carbonization, and ultimately combustion. I think of City roast as being dominated by origin and Maillard flavors, Full City to Vienna as increasingly dominated by caramelization, and French and Italian as being progressively ruined by carbonization. By the full carbonization stage, all bean character is lost — it’s literally just charcoal.

Starbucks is notorious for over-roasting their beans. “Dark roast” inherently requires more roasting, but most of the time it seems companies do it too long… and hence, the oily sheen that you mention.

It’s like somehow most people got the idea that the darker the roast, the “richer and more potent” the coffee. And this just isn’t the case. You can brew a strong coffee from medium roasted beans. I’ve also found that medium roast just tastes better, after some trial and error buying. The logic seems to fit — you roast to a medium darkness and you don’t lose the quality characteristics of the beans, a flavorful and appealing taste. Dark roast goes too far. It can smell more intense, but in taste it’s almost always bitter… requiring sugar and milk to temper it, make up for what’s lost.

The absolute best coffee should be so good that you would only want to drink it black. Next, for coffee that’s a little bitter, adding milk softens it. And then finally dark roasted coffee that’s bitter & acidic requires also adding sugar. That has been one of the “litmus tests” for me—if all I need to do is add milk for the coffee to taste good, then it’s decent. I’m really eager to get to that point where even milk isn’t necessary.

I think this “darker = richer” association is due to the fact that a bag of dark-roasted beans has a stronger smell than a bag of light-roasted beans, due to the flavorful oils being pushed out to the surface of the bean. But this doesn’t translate to the brewed cup, which is all that really matters.

And because the bag says “Dark, Rich, and Bold!” on it.

Thats what my folks used to do also. We used to drive about 20 miles to get to the A&P.

How refined are you taste buds? I've been freezing beans for years now in 5lb increments. Only issue is when I get certain beans, but most do fine in the freezer. Also, some beans require resting on arrival before freezing.

If you have the option not to freeze (buy/roast small batches), then an air-tight container works very well.