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Roasting and grinding your own coffee

No coffee tastes as good as your own roasted and grinded coffee!! And the roasting is not that difficult; that's why I put up this page.

Many of you have bought coffee in special stores where they grind it for you when you buy it. That coffee is very good, and better than all the coffee you buy in a regular food chain, but I will give you three reasons why I roast and grind my own coffee anyway:

• The fresher the coffe is, the better - Coffee from the special shop can in some cases be "old", that is, it has been many days since they roasted it (for long time storing the soft vacuume packed coffee from a normal food chain is better suited).
• You get the roast style you want - Want the coffee dark, or maybe light? There are many roast styles, but you seldom get more than one roast style for a specific coffee(-blend) in a coffee shop.
• If you like the smell of coffe, nothing is like experience of roasting and grinding yourself and then drinking it.

It is not as easy to get green coffee (coffee that is not roasted) as roasted coffee, that is in Norway at least. I got only two different types of green coffee until i discovered I could buy 3kg of green coffee of any kind at "Valkyrien Kaffe og te" at Majorstua. They get their coffee from "Solberg & Hansen AS" which offers green coffe if you buy 3kg at a time. The price was slightly smaller than buying the same amount of roasted coffe. Later I discovered Skien Kaffebrenneri which selles green coffee in their webshop.

Green beans of Monsooned Malabar, Costa Rica - SCACR, Don Quijote and Colombia - Abirama Relationship Coffee

I store my coffee in burlap bags which my wife, Heidi, made to me.

I first tried to roast coffe in the stove (see the picture on the right). I just spread some green beans on the plate and out it in the oven. The result was ok. The coffee tasted very nice, but the roasting was uneven on the different sides of the beans, even though I shaked the plate several times. The main problem with this method is the amount of smoke it generates. The smoke alarm will most certainly go off if you try, but the method is nice if you just want to try.

My next project involved a popcorn popper...