Roasting
Home roasters have access to a wide selection of green coffee beans, and is one of the attractions to the hobby. Home roasters can purchase small quantities of high quality beans from numerous importers and distributors. Some of the beans are rare or award winning, while others are from coffee orchards known for their quality and unique flavor. It is common for home roasters to purchase beans that come from a country, region, and orchard, and harvest year.
Those who are roasting for economic reasons can purchase green beans in bulk at lower cost than roasted beans from retailers. Home roasters can choose various types of equipment, each of which has certain attributes that can alter the flavor. Depending on the type of beans chosen, home roasters can save from 25–50%.
The four basic color categories of roasts are light, medium, medium-dark and dark.
A roasting profile describes the time the beans spend at each temperature during roasting including the final temperature prior to cooling. This greatly affects the flavor, aroma, and body of the coffee. Home roasters go to great lengths to control these roasting parameters including using computers for process control and data logging. Manually controlled equipment makes precise and repeatable profile control more difficult, though an experienced roaster can produce very good results. One of the lures of the hobby is experimenting with the roasting profile to produce optimal tasting coffee, albeit subjective.
Coffee roasting produces chaff and smoke, and should be done in a well-ventilated area, which is often difficult to accomplish in a home environment. Coffee roasting outdoors is affected by changes in air temperature and wind speed, requiring more frequent adjustments to the roasting process to produce repeatable results.
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