Green Bean Primer – How to roast green coffee beans
Most people who buy green coffee beans, buy them because they are looking to roast them at home. There are several ways you can go about roasting coffee at home, and the exciting part is that you can get started without any special equipment!
You can roast beans in the oven, although this is something I have personally never done, some of our customers have had some fantastic results. From what I know, I would suggest about 240 for 15-20 minutes depending on how dark you want the roast. This is similar temp and time to a commercial or larger domestic drum roaster.
The roast should be fairly easy to monitor, as the beans go through two ‘cracks’ and anything after the rolling first crack is palatable, although some prefer darker.
Here is an expert out of my journal, which I wrote up this a while ago about experience roasting green coffee beans in a fan forced oven.
I pre-heated the fan-forced oven to 250 degrees then backed off to 240 degrees after placing 1 tray of 500gm decaf on the 2nd top level (of 5 levels) and 1 tray of 500gm New Guinea on the bottom level.
At 20 mins, while cracks were still rolling, I shut off the oven and opened the door. The top 500gm decaf beans were smoking while the bottom 500gm New Guinea beans looked a nice brown. (I had assumed that the fan-forced oven would cook uniformly from top to bottom but maybe I’m wrong, or the different beans could have behaved differently.)
What I’ve learned so far:
- 20 minutes is too long for decaf beans on the 2nd top level at 240 degrees.
- 20 minutes may be OK for New Guinea beans on the bottom level at 240 degrees. The taste test will tell.
- Beans don’t fly around the oven like popcorn when they crack.
After letting his coffee rest for a few days:
The first cup this afternoon was the New Guinea stock. I ground it very fine and the taste of a long black was excellent. I was very impressed. My wife had a soy latte and was also happy.
I’ve just ground up some of the decaf which I ‘smoked’ yesterday and thought would be worthless. It still produced a drinkable cup, albeit with a slight ‘burnt’ taste.
Another roasting method that anyone can try is roasting the green coffee beans in a pot on the stove. I know a lot of people that also do it with heat guns with great success. There are also a few domestic fluid bed roasters (coffee roasters that roast with hot air) and a few domestic drum roasters (although these start to get very expensive)
You have to be careful home roasting, as the beans get incredibly hot and are actually exothermic for a period. It is a lot of effort, but very rewarding! As you get better at controlling the variables you get better tasting batches, and there really is nothing better than freshly roasted coffee.
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