Roast.Grind.Brew.

. . . leading from God. He recently (February, 2012) led our family from the city I love and have called home for the past 6 years and my wife Megan was born and raised in, Louisville, Ky. This is the city where I met my wife and where I began to experience really great coffee at Sunergos on Preston Street and at Quills on Baxter Avenue. In February He lead us back to my hometown of Clarkson, Ky and we soon missed all our wonderful friends and family, but we also missed that great coffee that we had fallen in love with while living in Louisville. I missed the coffee so much that I began researching how to get similarly great coffee here, in tiny little Clarkson. After much reading and research I came to the inevitable conclusion that the best and only way for me to do this would be to learn the fine art of roasting my own coffee. Unable to find a local source for green coffee beans from a local source, I decided to purchase an 8 lb. sampler from Sweet Marias.

I modified a new old stock hot air roaster so I could control the heat and blower independently with the hope that I would be able to achieve a decent sample roast from the beans. So far I have been quite pleased with the results but my ability to affect the roast has plateaued due to the limitations of the hot air roaster. Also I need to be able to roast larger amounts than this humble hot air roaster can manage. My continued research brought me to the Behmor 1600. As a transitional roaster, I believe this roaster to be the best option as a next step. The cost to benefit ratio is very high on this particular roaster is quite a bit higher than other options and is the only roaster in its price range that can to up to a pound of coffee in one batch. It has roasting profiles as well and looks to be extremely easy to modify. My goal will be to modify it such that I can create my own roasting profiles. To that end, I have plans to allow for computer control of the heating element, which should provide near infinite profile flexibility and consistency from one batch to the next, even if each batch consists of different beans.