Marc Grove , a boating friend from Florida, visited Seattle recently, and put the idea in our heads to take up roasting our own coffee beans.  He also put us on to a great site, Sweet Maria's.  

We love good coffee. We thought we were getting good coffee, buying San Francisco Bay French Roast and grinding the beans just before brewing a pot of coffee or firing up our Mukka Express capuccino maker.  But coffee has to be fresh to be at its best, and no coffee is fresher than home-roasted beans.  Sweet Maria's says it is at its best between 4 and 12 hours after roasting, and is only fresh for about 5 days. 

Sweet Maria's sells green coffee beans and purpose-built coffee roasters, but it has a ton of information on roasting coffee simply, including using hot air popcorn poppers.  Hot air popcorn poppers are actually excellent roasters, producing a very uniform roast.  In our usual "ready, fire, aim!" fashion, we ordered an inexpensive hot air popcorn popper, the Presto Poplite, from Amazon before we read all the gory details.

Well, it turns out Sweet Maria's says using the kind with the mesh screen in the bottom like the Presto Poplite is a big no-no.  Seems there is a tendency to ignite the chaff and start a fire.  We figured, what the heck, we'll give it a try.  We roasted three small batches (about 1/2 cup of green beans per batch) and they came out great, and we managed not to burn the house down!  Beans and chaff did jump out of the chamber though.  

 I got to thinking, I ought to be able to come up with a way to make the Poplite behave like the recommended poppers, such as the West Bend Poppery II.  I looked at the links on Sweet Maria's, and a lot of folks had extended the popping chamber with a tin can.  So, after eating a can of pork and beans, I washed the cans and removed both ends.  The can fit perfectly, so I figured the lid had to be pretty close too.  It was simple to cut a series of slits a little ways into the lid all around, and bend the resulting tabs up with needle nose pliers.  

I then put the lid into the Poplite chamber, and carefully pressed it down - it stayed put!  I put the can in place, which extended the roasting chamber up enough so the beans didn't jump out but the chaff, which is very light, did blow out the chute.  I finally did a little test roast - dark French in about six minutes!

The Poplite is a good roaster, because it has a 1440 watt heating coil - most of the others are around 1200 watts, and some are even less.  So it still gets plenty hot even with the new false floor. With the tin can conversion, I think I have made it functionally equivalent to the West Bend Poppery II.   The Poplite is inexpensive, too - about $20.

Read up on using a hot air popcorn popper at Sweet Maria's.  All you have to do is put the beans in the chamber and plug the popper in - that's it!   You do need to keep a close watch on it - you can see it go through the various roasts from light to medium to dark.  It also smokes quite a bit, so you might want to have some windows open or a fan running! After roasting, you want to cool the beans down as quicky as you can - I just pass them back and forth between two cheap colanders.  Give this a try, it is a lot of fun, and you'll get the best coffee you have ever had!