Bread Machine/Heat Gun Coffee Roasting
I took my bread machine out of retirement in the summer of 2006. It had been in a closet since September 2004, when I began eating low carb. Nope, I didn't fall off the wagon. I converted my trusty old friend into a coffee making tool.
Now, lots of people roast coffee using a heat gun and a dog bowl, but I didn't want to have to stir the beans—thus enters the bread machine. In case you think I am inventive, I'm not. There are other people doing this strange thing, and none of them are any crazier than I am, which may not be saying much.
In any case, this is what you need to join me in this venture:
- a bread machine (mine is a cheap Sunbeam, the kind you find in every thrift store on the planet);
- a heat gun with a high and a low speed ($34 Canadian in the paint aisle of the hardware store);
- some sort of pot holder or protective gear so you don't burn your hand when you lift the bread machine bucket;
- a fan, or some other cooling device, topped with a metal strainer or colander; and,
- green beans. I used 3/4 of a pound for the first roast, and later found that I can easily double that amount.
This is my bread machine, out on the patio, on top of the beer fridge. That's my $34 heat gun along side of it The brown speckles are chaff, the papery substance that flies off the coffee beans during roasting. A piece of chaff occasionally catches fire as you do this. It looks a little like a mosquito as it comes in contact with a bug zapper. It took about 8 minutes to reach first crack, and wowie kazowie, you really can hear it pop. Waaaay different than my iRoast2. I stopped the roast 2 minutes after first crack ended, before second crack. Roasting 3/4 of a pound of beans is a smoky affair, but there was a nice breeze and the smoke didn't bother me at all. You would not want to do this indoors, unless you had one heck of an exhaust fan going right over the beans.
>
This is my cooling device. I grabbed a fan from inside, turned it on high, and placed a strainer on top of it. Any chaff that had not flown out whilst roasting exited during the cooling off period. The beans were entirely cool in 90 seconds. I held the strainer a bit above the fan and shook the beans back and forth to aid in the mixing and reduce the cooling time.
Ta Daa. These are the finished coffee beans. The white splotch in the corner is my ovglove. It's made of Kevlar and comes in handy when you BBQ or have to take hot pans out of the stove. I used it to grab the very hot handle of the bread machine bucket when I needed to transfer the beans to the strainer for cooling. The roast is a little bit uneven, but not bad. I am pretty sure that I'll be able to get a more even roast with practice. I'd call it a City +/almost Full City, a good solid medium roast, which is where I was trying to take these particular beans.
Edit: When I took the beans indoors and looked at them in indoor light,
the roast looked much more even, as even as anything I ever get out of my IR2,
at least. Damn sunbeams.
