tlcorbin
Hazel CastilloHome Coffee Roasting Machines
March 23rd 2007 18:41
I bought my IRoast home coffee roaster online a couple of years ago, from a coffee website called Sweet Maria's.
It's a good little machine, and the only one at that time under $200.00 that looked good to me. Now there is a wider selction.
My only complaints are that the machine smokes, as warned on Sweet Maria's site, on some roasts, (it seems to have something to do with the beans I'm roasting, since it doesn't always happen), and it is loud. Also, not more than 2 or three days of coffee beans per roast. O.k., two days, max.
But, at Sweet Maria's they will tell you everything. I mean that. They will show you all the machines, with explicit pictures and step by step instructions.
They want you to know about their coffee and the machines they stock. They want you to come back, and they are going to tell you everything they can about anything they review, so you don't feel cheated at any point. As I said, they want you to come back.
The initial page introducing you to home coffee roasting is charming, as they talk about a time before everything was canned. Of course, Sweet Maria's kind of dispels that image of vintage times, by quickly informing you that the coffee probably tasted like swill (because of the low quality beans...)
The friendly, informal tone of the site is conveyed in this description of Panama Lot 12686 (green coffee):
" Notes: I am not going to dress up this lot with any fancy names … I abhor that. We give it a name that speaks to its origin, and this lot is a mutt. It's a pooled lot, a mix of small farm coffees from the Boquete region, falling under the desgination Boquete Euro Prep. Euro Prep (EP) is the sorta minimum mill preparation standard in my book, whereas for a lot of coffee buyers it is something to advertise. Why promote the fact a coffee is relatively defect-free? All coffee should be, or the taster will never have the chance to experience the true origin character of the cup: it will be obscured by the foul flavor of bad beans. Anyway, it all adds up to a coffee we can never truly know ... we don't know exactly whose coffee went into it. And perhaps, on the face of it, I should reject lots like this, not even evaluate them. But then I feel like I would be a dishonest coffee prig, buying coffee by name, by pedigree, not by the actual cup quality. And here we have a lot, perhaps rare in its own right, for beating the odds. It's way too early in the season for good Centrals, and coffee this lively, this clean, should not be possible from pooled lots. But here it is, defiantly, clean, snappy, lively, and premature in the season. So I call it 12686, only by lot number, because that's all I know, and extrapolate that it is caturra and catuai since that is basically all there is in Boquete. While the City roast is light bodied and very high-toned, I enjoyed the more mature, ripe fruit in the FC and FC roasts."
(By the way, this coffee costs less as you go from 1 pound at $4.60 to 5 pounds at $20.01)
If you love coffee, and have been thinking about a home roaster to cut your bills in half (and it did for me), give them a visit. They aren't of course, the only good site. I just think they are one of the best.
| 40 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
Subscribe to this blog
