Why Roast Coffee at Home?
One reason - because it tastes better! There is a HUGE taste difference between fresh-roasted coffee and the garbage you get in a can at the grocery store. That may sound a little harsh, but it's true - once you taste coffee the way it used to taste (most people home-roasted 100 years ago), you will never settle for anything else again. Even coffee from your local specialty coffee shop may be only slightly better than the stuff you get at the grocery store - especially if it's roasted at their corporate headquarters halfway across the country. By the time it gets to you, it's stale.

There are, of course, other reasons but the taste is the primary reason to roast your own beans. You can probably find local coffee shops that actually roast their own beans on-site, and they are probably excellent. But most shops charge between $8.00 - $15.00 per pound (or more!) for average-quality roasted whole-bean coffee. You can buy excellent quality unroasted (green) beans for an average of $3.50 - $5.50 per pound, and roast them exactly the way you like them. Green beans last from 1-2 years (they only get stale after you roast them) so you can stock up on your favorite varieties and always have them when you want them. The average American drinks over 400 cups of coffee per year - if you pay half-price for green beans, think how much money you can save this year while drinking better coffee, roasted at home! Roasting your own makes economic sense also!

What Makes Home-Roasted Coffee Taste Better?
First, the type and quality of the beans makes a huge difference. The "arabica" variety of coffee bean has much better taste than the dirt-cheap "robusta" bean. Guess which type makes up a large percentage of the coffee blend found in most cans of grocery store coffee? Right - the cheap stuff. That makes it easier to sell a can of coffee for less, but what you get tastes terrible. "Flavored" coffees are even worse - coffee companies can use chemical flavoring to cover up the taste of the cheapest beans they can get their hands on!

Next, it's a simple matter of freshness. Coffee tastes best 12-24 hours after roasting. It starts the process of losing flavor and aroma immediately, and by the time it's 10 days old coffee is stale (some experts claim 7 days is about it). You can taste a big difference in coffee that you roasted yesterday, and the same coffee a week later. (Try it!) So if you are buying coffee from the grocery store that's been in a can for months... well, do the math. The "fresh-roasted" whole-bean coffee in the fancy grinding machine at the grocery store isn't any better - it's been in that bin for a while, and probably sat in a warehouse before that.

In addition to age, the roasting process itself is a huge factor. People like their coffee roasted differently. In New England, most coffee is traditionally served at a fairly light roast. In the Pacific Northwest, coffee is usually roasted very dark. Bostonians would think that coffee in Seattle tastes like strong bitter mud, whereas a Seattle native would wonder why the coffee on Cape Cod tastes weak and grassy. It's all a matter of what you are accustomed to.

A Huge World of Coffee and You Control The Taste
There are hundreds of different coffees from dozens of countries - and they all taste different! But the roasting makes all the difference in the world. Some coffees taste wonderful when medium-roasted but get bitter when dark roasted. Others have a nutty taste when medium roasted and develop a wonderful chocolate taste when roasted darker. If you are fortunate enough to have a good local shop that roasts their own beans on-site, you have probably noticed that you like coffees from some countries better than others, and some varieties within those countries better than others.

When you roast coffee at home, you can roast it to perfection - YOUR definition of perfection. When you buy pre-roasted coffee, you are stuck with the taste of someone else's roast style. That's a little like eating at a steakhouse that only cooks steaks medium-well. If you like your steaks medium-rare, sorry, you're out of luck. Who would put up with that? And yet, we accept that from our coffee suppliers.

Some coffee shops over-roast everything so that the subtle flavors of the individual beans disappear in their smoky heavy-handed roast, and all the varieties taste the same. In a cookie-cutter world where every cup needs to taste the same at every franchise regardless of where the bean came from or when it was picked, I suppose that makes sense for them. But that doesn't mean you have to be stuck drinking it!

Once you start roasting your own coffee, you will find your own style and discover how easy it is to bring out subtle taste differences in your coffee that you never knew existed. Stop accepting your steaks cooked their way!







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