Roasting Coffee!
Aside from computing, my other hobby is coffee! I have a Hottop coffee roaster that allows me to well, roast coffee. I’ve had it for awhile now and have built up quite a collection of different varieties of green beans (I lost count how many, but it fills up a good portion of the coffee room). Coffee roasting is actually a fairly boring thing to do, it takes about 30 minutes all up, and for the most part you do nothing. The interesting parts are blending and watching them eject out of the roaster, and if you are into profiling that can be interesting but the Hottop automates some of the process.
Most people who roast coffee take great care in the science of blending, I don’t. I prefer to pick some random things and give it a go, I do occasionally get some undrinkable cups, but I get some awesome ones too. But in saying that I do have some no-go blends, and try to aim for a full bodied coffee with minimal acidity.
The roasting process on the Hottop is fairly straight-forward, let it pre-heat to 75°C pour in the beans (that you blended while it was pre-heating) and wait about 18 minutes. Once the temperature of the roaster gets to about 210°C things start to happen fast, there are three stages of cracks. Coffee roasted just past the first crack is what you usually get in a cafe, the second crack is a darker roast, and the third crack is what you get at Starbucks (charcoal). At the end Hottop ejects the beans out of the roaster onto a rotating cooling tray to cool down. Then you start drinking the next day!
