The Ultimate Guide to Roasting Coffee at Home with an Air Popcorn Popper

Hello , this is Bart with the green coffee beanery home Coffee experiments .

And today we're gonna be learning how to roast coffee with an air popcorn popper .

In this video , we'll cover preparation the roasting process , cooling and storage of the beans as well as some problems we had and how you can correct them when you do it yourself .

The popper we chose was a presto pop light .

Pictured it right ?

Cost us about $20 us and we chose it because it had numerous positive reviews specifically for home coffee roasting for this experiment .

We chose a Costa Rican bean mostly for its small size .

We felt like with the small roasting chamber , a smaller bean would get better agitation and a more even roast to prepare the popper , we filled the provided one half cup measuring cup with beans and also placed a metal colander under the discharge chute to catch any chaff that was released from the beans .

During the roasting process .

From there , we simply turned on the popper poured in the beans and began to roast .

You can see there's quite a bit of agitation in the roasting chamber which is good from the underlying air and should promote a nice even roast though we did decide to give it an early stir for good measure from there .

We took a step back and allowed the beans some time to develop .

As you can see , we did lose a handful of beans early on in the roasting process .

But as the beans began to heat and expand this stopped , we only probably lost 10 to 15 beans total in the whole process .

At a minute 15 , you can see that the beans are now starting to release quite a bit of chaff into the air .

So we opted to take out the stir stick , put the roasting cap back on to contain some of the mass .

Hopefully get more of the chaff to fall down into the metal colander and watch through the transparent lid .

The roasting process progressed much more quickly than we expected .

As you can see at the two minute and 32nd point , we already have a nice light roast going with the first crack beginning .

The first crack is a a popping sound almost sounds like popping popcorn as the moisture in the beans is beginning to heat and expand .

The roasting continued to advance very quickly , much more quickly than we had read in reviews for this device .

And at around the four minute mark , we had already reached the second crack indicating that the beans had approached a dark roast .

We dumped the calendar to clean it out , poured the beans into the colander and then stirred the beans outside in our metal colander until they had fully cooled .

We placed our cooled beans into a zip top bag .

Removed all of the excess air to prevent the oxygen from turning the beans stale prematurely , then place the beans on our countertop to give them time to rest .

This is going to be a process known as degassing for about 24 to 48 hours .

The beans will emit carbon dioxide as part of their normal development process .

And you want to typically wait at least 24 hours before grinding the freshly roasted beans .

Though the exact amount of time that you want to wait is a highly debated subject .

In the industry .

We did produce two batches of roasted beans .

The first batch you saw in the video that produced the darker more French roast as a result of the roasting process accelerating more quickly than we expected .

And a second batch when we had the timing down a little bit better , that turned out to be a medium roast .

That was our target from the beginning .

After the beans were stored , we used our trusty Dustbuster to clean up the chaff released during the roasting process .

And then sat down to think about the lessons we learned during the roasting .

Our first lesson learned was to adjust the amount of coffee you're using based on the action in the roasting chamber as you'll recall .

We originally started with one half cup of coffee and had quite a bit of motion in the chamber , maybe a little bit more than we wanted .

In our second attempt , we increased that to three quarters of a cup .

Still got a very nice even roast , but didn't lose the beans and have the bouncing action that you saw during the first video .

Our second recommendation involves smoke control .

As you recall from the video , we generated quite a bit of smoke , particularly from the first roast you saw where we had a darker roast , which tends to put off more smoke .

An improved set up would be something like this where you're located underneath a microwave or flame hood that can actively vent the smoke .

If you don't have an option like this , we'd recommend that you do it outside or in your garage .

Our third and final adjustment would be to the bean selection as you recall .

Our 1st and 2nd batch turned out quite a bit differently and we think this is a function of the small bean while it did get the agitation , we were looking for smaller beans are going to roast more quickly than larger beans and ultimately will be harder to control the roasting process .

Use a larger bean , a moderate sized bean , it'll give you more opportunity to be able to control exactly the roast level that you get at the end of your process .

So how much coffee did we make well , the three quarters cup of beans we began with turned out to be 106 g of roasted beans using the standard metric of 1.63 g per ounce of water .

We would yield 65.03 ounces of brewed coffee from our beans , which is approximately five small or tall coffees from your typical gourmet roaster .

I don't know about you , but I can easily drink two or three of these in a day .

So my recommendation for you would be to roast more than one batch at a time .

Otherwise , you'll be roasting every third day concluding with our overall assessment , the air popcorn popper was a very inexpensive way to get a good even roast .

On the downside , it did roast very quickly , which made it difficult to control exactly the roast level that we wanted and it did have a low output per roast , which means that you would need to roast fairly frequently or more than one batch per roast .

So we hope this helps .

Our next planned experiment will be roasting coffee with a cast iron skillet .

But let us know what you'd like to see either in the comments section below or by visiting our website at green coffee beanery dot com .

And until then , thanks for watching .