10 Reasons to Roast Your Own Coffee

1. Roasting your own coffee is cheaper than buying roasted coffee.

It’s simple Econ 101. The more steps you have to take to process a food, the more you add to its cost. Green coffee beans range in cost from $3 a pound to about $18 a pound for Hawaiian Kona and Jamaican Blue Mountain. That may seem expensive if you favor Maxwell House or Folgers by the tin, but compared to a bag of Starbucks, it’s peanuts. Compare it to buying your coffee by the cup at the coffee house and you’re saving a fortune.

2. Coffee roasting at home gives you more control over your coffee.
Want to try Tanzania peaberry in city roast, but your favorite outlet only sells it in French roast? No problem if you’re roasting at home. You can roast coffee exactly to the degree that you want it.

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3. Home roasted coffee makes an incredibly luxurious gift.

Lay out $30 for a ten pound assortment of coffees from your favorite online supplier and put in a few hours over the hot stove and you can put together home-roasted coffee samplers for your entire Christmas list. Be careful, though – once they taste your home roasted coffee, you may end up with a standing order from your loved ones.

4. Roasting your own coffee at home is far easier than you’d ever believe.

If you can pop popcorn on the stove without scorching the kernels, you can roast your own coffee. It really is that simple. You can fancy it up with a home coffee roaster, or a fluid bed roaster and spend a small fortune on accessories, but all you really need to roast your coffee is a heavy-weight flat-bottom pan, a steel colander and a strong stirring arm.

5. Put together your own unique coffee blends.

Roasting single origin coffees can keep you busy with variety for years, but eventually, you’ll find yourself experimenting with blending different beans to come up with your own unique coffee blends. It’s an excellent way to balance flavors and come up with your own signauture coffee.

6. Impress your friends. No, really.

Even just telling your friends that you’re roasting your own coffee is impressive, but once they taste the fruit of your labors, they’ll start calling you a coffee guru. They’ll all start hanging around for coffee on Sunday mornings, too.

7. You can buy green coffee beans in bulk and save big.

As if green coffee beans weren’t already an economical choice, it gets even better when you buy in bulk. Green coffee beans can be stored for up to a year without any appreciable loss of quality. When you buy in 50 pound bags, you’ll pay as little as $3 a pound for excellent coffee.

8. It only takes about fifteen minutes to roast up enough coffee for a week.

We’ve lost the art of roasting coffee, but not all that long ago it was a basic household chore that any housewife or housekeeper mastered. It’s no harder to do than making homemade pan gravy – and takes even less time.

9. Roasting your own coffee at home is so much better for the environment.

Bet you never thought about that one, did you? Most green coffee beans are sold packaged in burlap or cotton bags. Roasted coffee beans need to be packaged in vacuum sealed bags or tin cans to preserve their freshness. Since green beans are far less finicky, every pound of green coffee that you buy and roast at home keeps one tin can or vacuum pack wrapper out of the landfill.

10. And… saving the best for last – once you taste your own home roasted coffee, nothing else will ever ever taste as good again.

Fresh roasted coffee is at its peak of flavor anywhere from 24-48 hours after roasting. Unless you live close to a coffee roasting house, you just can’t get roasted coffee any fresher than roasting your own. And once you’ve tasted fresh – really really fresh – roasted coffee, you won’t believe what a difference it makes.