Stovetop Roastery

For the longest time I’ve wanted to roast coffee beans at home. I had done all the research online on how to this at home. I landed on using a whirly pop / stovetop popcorn maker to roast the beans. There are ways to oven roast coffee beans.

I bought the stovetop popcorn maker at a local grocery store for $20. You can make the purchase online; I just happened to see it at the grocery store one lunch time just before Christmas.

I then bought the green coffee beans from a local Toronto coffee place, The Green Beanery. The store is located at Bloor and Bathurst with a warehouse on King Street West. They do have an online store as well. I bought the beans online (1 lb Brazilian Peaberry and 1/2 lb Colombian decaf) and opted to pick them up at the store.

I had already roasted the decaf beans earlier in the week. So the steps were the same in roasting the Peaberry beans.

I put the entire pound of beans into the popcorn maker and stove was on a medium heat. It is so important to stay at the stove and continuously whirl around the popcorn maker’s handle. It will and does smoke a lot as the machine and beans heat up.

It will take approximately 8 or 9 minutes to hear the first crack of the coffee beans. The cracking sound will die down and few minutes later a second cracking will happen. The sound of the Peaberry’s cracking was very different from the decaf beans. As I experiment with different beans and different types of roasts, I’ll get better at determining when to stop and what works best.

I stopped almost immediately after the second cracking and the roast looked perfect. I emptied out the beans from the popcorn machine onto a baking sheet. This way the beans get to cool down before I put them into a container.

It’s definitely fun to do and experiment with roasting beans. I’ll be trying different coffee beans that I normally wouldn’t get from my regular coffee place.