Roasting Coffee in a Popcorn Popper
October 10, 2007
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With pan roasting behind us we looked forward to roasting some coffee in a hot-air popcorn popper. In fact, it was a blurb about someone trying this method that led us to create Perk-O-Late in the first place. Roasting in a popcorn popper is a quick, cheap and (very) easy way to roast your own coffee at home.
With home roasters easily in the $250-$500 price range, the $15 price tag of a hot-air popcorn popper makes this method all the more attractive to the novice roaster. We got a bit fancy and picked up an infrared, non-contact thermometer (about thirty bucks on Amazon). You can also do this with a thermocouple, but the infrared thermometer is not much more expensive and so much more useful for things like measuring the surface temperature of your cat, checking the temperature of a frosty beverage fresh from the fridge, or the surface temperature of someone’s butt.
As mentioned, roasting with the popcorn popper is easy and fast. The longest roasts we did were only about five and half, to six minutes for a full city+ roast. We quickly observed that—since green coffee is bigger and more dense than popcorn kernels—the beans were not being sufficiently agitated by the air jets at the start of the roast. Once the beans get to a nice tan color (about 270-300 degrees), the air jets will rotate the beans well and give you a good amount of movement. However, by then we had several burned beans which had been stuck right on the jets. For our second roast in the popcorn popper we busted out the DIY ingenuity and used a bent coat hanger to stir the beans until they got to the tan/brown stage just before first crack when the air jets could take over.
We had several successful roasts using this method but one problem still remained—the final temperature when we stopped the roasts was over 550 degrees. We thought this was a problem that was inherent to the nature of roasting in the popcorn popper, since you have no control over the heating element, but we stumbled over a solution. In a stroke of genius (a.k.a. laziness) we decided to used a wooden spoon in a drill to stir the beans for those first few critical minutes of the roast. Doing this we noticed the time to first crack was about a minute longer and the roast itself was a minute to minute-and-a-half longer. Most importantly, the maximum temperature could be held to around 450 degrees by running the spoon-drill apparatus through the entire roast.
It is important to pay close attention to the “cracks” when roasting in the popcorn popper. Since you have no choice but to run the heating element at full power it is going to be a much faster roast than with other methods. As mentioned above, it’s only about six minutes (at most) for a full city+ to french roast. To quickly cool the beans we used an 11×16 cookie sheet, spread the beans out in one layer and cooled them in a freezer for a few minutes (until about room temperature). Over all, roasting in a popcorn popper is as simple as dumping in your green beans and flipping the switch. With just a few tries you can get some excellent coffee at a fraction of the cost of other roasting solutions!
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was this smokey at all? could you do it inside or do you have to do it outside? thanks.
The smoke is bad enough, along with all the chaff that comes off the beans, that I would highly advise against doing it inside. The best places are either your garage or porch because the chaff can ignite if it gets sucked into the popper. This isn’t especially common, but a fan or a breeze is very helpful to blow it all away from your popper. Also, be sure to let the popper cool off completely after each roast!
I am impressed. Being a novice at roasting, How many tries did it take to get the beans your desired roast?
How did they taste after your experiment?
Thanks
We burned our first batch pretty thoroughly. The second attempt was over-roasted, but not quite burnt. By the third try I would say we had made some good coffee. It is harder to get a good light roast from the popcorn popper because the roast is so fast. But for this coffee we were roasting (Brazilian Morenhina Formosa) FC+ was a good roast so the popcorn popper worked really well. That Brazilian has kind of a weak nose, just a very earthy, organic smell; a mild floral and wood cup with a viscous mouth-feel.
Maybe you could try a rotary popcorn popper plugged into light dimmer to adjust heat and speed.
I have been roasting 6 oz. batches at home successfully with an IRoast2 ($150 air roaster). The presto pop air popcorn popper I found for $2 at the thrift store looks just like it but without a temp. selector or chaff collector. I roasted 2 ounces of Sweet Marias green coffee beans successfully with no modifications. Twenty percent were lost due to being blown out but a simple screen should contain them next time. I only had to stir them the first few seconds. I can see that this is a realistic way to roast small quantities and would be content if this was the only roaster on the market. I will keep this “coffee roaster” as a back-up. Remember, roasting only what you will use right away (the roasted beans should be stored for a couple of days prior to grinding) is best so for one person this is a way to have freshly rosted coffee at home. You can purchase freshly roasted coffee from small roasters like Sweet Mariasin Oakland, CA and be assured that fresh green beans went into their roaster and they will send the roasted beans to you right away. They should remain in the bag with it’s 1-way air valve for a while (the aroma gets better and better) so you will have fresh coffee but doing it your self from green beans is a rewarding experience.
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