I’m officially a home roasting newbie now. I acquired a West End Poppery II off of Ebay and placed my first Sweet Maria’s order. It’s nice to see how cheap it is to buy green beans, even for the end consumer. For $30 shipped, I managed to acquire 5 pounds of green. Sweet.

So I was standing in my driveway Friday night trying to roast beans in a popcorn popper. No doubt the neighbors wondered what the hell I was up to. The first couple tries outside were a wash as the beans never seemed to get quite hot enough to really go through the first crack. It was a bit frustrating, but the process didn’t seem too messy so I moved the whole operation into the kitchen.

Doing the roast under the exhaust vent worked a lot better! I got a nice full city roast of Espresso Monky. Very cool to hear those beans crackling away, knowing that uber fresh coffee await for Saturday morning!

It was fun to try a new espresso blend Saturday morning, but doubly so because I’d roasted it up the previous night. It was admittedly, not as good as the sainted Black Cat, but still a very respectable espresso blend. My only complaint was that the body was not as full as the Black Cat and I’m not sure if that’s attributable to my newbie roasting technique or is characteristic of the blend.

I also fired up a batch of the Organic Ethiopia Dry-Process Sidamo, which I’m enjoying right now as I hammer away at WordPress’s rich text editor. (Does anybody remember the old days of the web when men were men and we edited web pages in asinine programs like DOS “edit” or “notepad”. Now it’s just all *fancy*. What’s a crack caffeine addict to do?)  Anyway, I dig the Sidamo.  Yum.
PS: If this obscure blog post reaches any roasting aficionados, give me a shout out.  I’m eager to suck knowledge from the brains of complete strangers.