I've had Turkish coffee once. It's like they scooped that stuff straight out of the La Brea tarpits. I loved it. Supposedly, your fortune can be read with the gritty remains in your coffee cup.

Anyway -- thanks for the tips on the Aeropress. My coworker had the same experience in that he didn't fully warm up to the thing until he tweaked the brewing process a bit.

Got all the stuff in the mail. I got a couple of different types of green beans -- one from Rwanda and one from Brazil. Sadly, I'm going on a snow trip this weekend so I won't be able to get roasting until early next week.

Thailand is actually made out of sugar, didn't know if you knew that. 


Coffee from Rwanda huh.  That's some rich soil....

Finally got a chance to do some coffee roasting! This is my first crack at it, and I don't get to taste the results until tomorrow. Anyway, here are some pics.

All of the supplies. I started out with a 1/2-cup load. (I did a 3/4-cup load for the second run, which worked better):


Here is a pic of the green beans:


Going into the re-purposed popper:


Green beans spinning:


The chaff of the beans floating out of the chute being collected in a bowl. Wet paper towel helps them "stick" better:


Beans are starting to turn color after about 2 minutes:


After about 5 minutes, roasted beans:


I'm having a hard time hearing the first and second cracks because of how loud the popper is, so I may do a couple of batches on stove top to get a better feel for it. All in all, it was pretty smooth and painless for the first couple of go-arounds. And I only managed to set off my smoke alarm twice.

The girlfriend got me one of these vacuum brewers for Christmas, which looks like it came straight out of Bill Nye's lab. It's a bit daunting. Don't want my neighbors walking in thinking I'm running a meth lab over here. Anyone ever use one of these?

Just roasted up a batch of El Salvador Bourbon:


Been experimenting for the past week or so, and am now starting to get some decently even roasts. I've done about 8 or 9 roast batches so far. The first few batches were roasting much too quickly, where lighter roasts wouldn't be possible. I got around that problem by running a 50' extension cord from the wall to my popper/roaster. This allowed me to stretch the roast times even more to give the beans time to develop in the lighter roasts.

I also had the issue of roasts developing unevenly because there wasn't enough movement during the drying phase of the roast. I start shaking the popper early in the roast (until sounds of first crack) which gave me a more even roast as well as agitating the beans to stretch out roast times even more.

Where I was getting to Full City roasts in about 5 minutes before, I'm at the end of first crack at about 6 minutes now.

I find myself favoring the Central American beans so far. Both El Salvadors and a Nicaraguan Maragogype bean I've roasted have all been great. My favorite though was an Ethiopian bean from the Duromina Cooperative, a very jammy and floral bean. One bean that I did NOT like was a Sumatra coffee, which was syrupy and muddy -- honestly tasted like dirt. After about 4 or 5 days it calmed down and was drinkable, but I'm not in a hurry to roast another batch of that. I did a couple of South Americans -- a Colombian and Brazilian -- both of which were good and not very memorable.

Nice

Your thoughts on Aeropress vs siphon?

I've ordered an Indian coffee filter, my uncle/aunt that own a coffee estate in Yercaud swear by it.