So in 2006, I quit smoking. In 2014 (and again in 2016 but that's a longish story) I quit drinking. I'm out of vices, so I needed a new one. Enter, coffee.
I bought a ceramic hand grinder and a french press from Amazon, ordered some BRCC (you know, before they stuck their foot in their mouth), figured out a good grind size, figured out time and temp...great coffee. Then my cholesterol started to spike (unfiltered coffee, that wonderful sheen on the top...yeah, that's like straight cholesterol...) so I switched to a pourover; a Chemex, basically. The problem with a Chemex is, it's kind of big and what we me drinking from a large mug, I basically poured the water into the Chemex and poured the resulting coffee into my mug. Why not just pour the water straight into my mug and bypass the Chemex? And as nice as my ceramic burr hand grinder was...why not automated it?
So I bought one of these to grind with; it doesn't get quite as coarse as I'd like for my occasional french press days but it's still not bad..I bought it in 2018, so it's been chugging along just fine, and in daily use since March of 2020...that's a pretty good record IMO.
I also bought one of these originally to try it as a unit but discovered that the top filter part not only fits a Chemex filter almost perfectly, but will happily sit right on top of my coffee mug...bypassing the need for a Chemex entirely; just put in a filter, dump in the coffee, put it on top of my coffee mug, and pour in the water!...
...after a while, ordering coffee online started to add up. More than that, places that at first advertised "We only roast when you order and we ship same day!" changed to "We ship as soon as we can!"...dropping any pretense of only roasting on demand. Price didn't change though. And if I'm gonna coffee snob...it better damn well have been roasted no more than 10 minutes before it hit the back of a UPS truck, you know? And buying coffee from a supermarket is just straight out (though I do buy Caribou Coffee here locally on occasion, whole bean only; since they are a local concern and the coffee can't have been sitting around THAT long, right?)
So, I took the next logical step.
I ordered one of these; an SR800 coffee roaster. Insert "one of these babys salesman slap meme" here. However, I ordered it in what, October of last year? So, protip: you want to roast outside; it WILL set off any/all fire alarms inside. And guess what temp it was here in the Tunda for all winter? Yeah...coffee don't roast so well when it's -20F outside in the garage.
I generally use The Captain's Coffee as a resource for a lot of things; they have some great youtube videos up on how to do things (like, roast), some great bean selections, spare parts for the roaster, stuff like that.
It's just now getting warm enough to roast again, so hopefully sometime this weekend I can do some more roasting. The few batches I was able to roast was all Ethopian, which isn't bad but it's a bit difficult for a novice like me to get dialed in...I'm going to pick up some Central or South American beans which seem to be a bit more forgiving of roasting errors, and go from there.