Roast your beans.

A bean-to-cup coffee machine needs a good supply of roasted beans for a great cup of coffee.

Buying Beans

It is not uncommon to buy roasted coffee beans at the supermarket, and they are cheap to buy and come in a wide variety of blends. You can usually find what you need to feed your bean-to-cup machine from the supermarket.

Some specialist traders will either roast the beans themselves to buy roasted beans to blend and sell, which can be on quite a small scale compared to a supermarket. But either way, you are buying roasted beans for your bean-to-cup coffee machine.

Raw Beans

If you can get a supply of raw – green coffee beans, then you can roast them yourself. This can be even better than buying roasted beans at the supermarket, and you get a much fresher roast bean for fresh grinding for a fresh cup of coffee. You also get to control the roast just how you like it. Roasting your own may take trial and error to convey exactly how you want the roast, but you can guarantee it will be freshly roasted.

Fresh Roasting

Roasting your coffee beans can have a wow factor when you are complemented by the cup of coffee you serve. The new roasting process isn’t complicated; you can quickly complete it on the kitchen side. The secret to fresh bean roasting is the home coffee roasting machine.

The home roasting machines are easy to use and give excellent results. The devices fall into two distinct styles.

One is an electric roaster; you plug it in and set the time and temperature to perfect roast the raw coffee beans. The machine does all the work, mixes the beans, provides heat and runs a timer. This all-in-one electric version on Amazon gets excellent reviews.

The other distinct type is the gas-powered roaster that uses a gas hob to heat the raw coffee beans, which means you need a gas hob to operate it and a plug to run the rotating motor. This gas burner coffee roaster on Amazon is well-liked.

Simple Process

The bean roasting process is outlined in our post. The primary bean roasting operations and home roasting runs will follow the same process on a different scale.

A typical home coffee bean roast will go along these lines:

• Add 2.5 – 3 cups of raw, uncooked coffee beans.
• Set heat to maximum. (there is no need to preheat the machine)
• Set the machine’s timer to 25 minutes.
• At around the 20-minute mark, you will hear the first ‘crack’ of the beans
• At the first crack, turn the heat to 180°C or stop the machine and cool the beans. You can stop here or roast more, dependent on the flavour you are trying to achieve.
• Reset the timer to now run for 10-20 minutes. This will develop a more roasted flavour of the bean—less time for a lighter roast and longer for a full roast.

Your experimentation with times and temperatures will make your roasted coffee beans personal to you.

Not Just Coffee

The bean roasting machines can roast more than just green coffee, they can roast beans, seeds, and peanuts and even make popped corn. Investing in another kitchen gadget can have multiple uses and open up a new home-roasting hobby.