Shortly after falling in love with great coffee (thank you, Europe!), we returned home and wanted more. This amazing experience that is so readily available overseas is still quite rare here. A lot of things go into the mix to produce a great cup of coffee: quality beans, excellent roast technique and proper brewing. A LOT can go wrong.
Here, we’ll discuss home roasting. Today, it is still difficult to buy fresh roasted beans that are actually roasted properly. Over a decade ago when I took the plunge it was impossible. And thus started my own journey.
The Gear
We honestly feel that the Fresh Roast series is right now the best gear available for a typical home roaster. This includes the SR500 and SR700. Either of these mini-roasters can produce absolutely stellar results. You still need good beans and good technique, of course. The entry price point is quite attractive. A brand new SR500 is usually $179 including several pounds of beans.
Downside? The batch size is a touch smaller than we’d like. Hopefully, the next version will allow for more capacity.
However, we can get a lot more out of these little gems if we use external cooling at the end of the roast. External cooling is also good for roast quality. Now we can roast an entire pound in only an hour! So a win-win. There are several articles & videos out there that detail building a cooling tray using a shop-vac, colander, and plastic bucket. Failing that, use a big fan with whatever works for you.
This would be in 6 quick batches, which also allows the flexibility of roasting different beans and actually achieving a few blends at the same time. Not bad, eh?
Rather than make this a lengthy article, I created a PDF document that is a good primer on how we use the Fresh Roast, even today. The Fresh Roast is actually our sample roaster at Liberty City Roasters.
We update this document from time to time, so please consider subscribing to get the latest scoop 🙂 Without further ado, here it is: Liberty City Roasters – Fresh Roast Process – ver 2.3
Thank you for your kind attention. Please feel free to contact us here – or at the Fresh Roast forum on Facebook.