Whirly Pop Magic

I swear to god, give me a lighter and an old tin can and I will figure out a way to roast coffee beans with it. Still hiding out at my friends house after the debacle in Mexico and the recent video that surfaced  of me  and Maria Conchita Alonso in full on BDSM fetish ware, I have been riding the storm out roasting up my friends huge back log of green coffee beans using nothing but a gas stove,a modified whirly pop popcorn maker with an attached thermometer, a heavy duty skillet, and a couple of well placed fans.

While using the old fashioned stove top whirly pop can be seen as roughing it in this new era of home coffee roasting, after getting several dozen batches under my belt, I find that roasting with this rather simple tools is a lot like driving a stick shift. Sure, its hard to talk on the phone or play with the radio while you are doing it, but you also have more hands on control over your roast.

Since I am the one doing the stirring and adjusting the heat, I have much more control over the outcome of the roast than what I had with my Behmor or Nesco Air Popper. If the roast feels like it is getting away from me, for example, I can dial down the heat and stir the beans faster to help stall the second crack, or if the beans simple refuse to start popping, I can crank up the heat and force those babies to crack. While the buttons and settings on the Behmor also give you some control, it is still all guess work until you dial in your roast. With the Behmor, once you start the drum rolling, the only thing that you can do is add time or hit cool if the roast gets away from you, you have no control over the temperature, and if run out of time, tough luck. Maria Conchita Alanso was exactly the same way.

Preheating

The first batch I roasted in the Whirly, I had dumped in the beans before the drum got heated up and wound up having to turn the crank for nearly an half hour before my beans were finished. It probably did not help that I dumped in a shit load of bean as well. After that first batch, I learned that letting the popper heat up to 350 degrees before dumping a slightly smaller load of beans (9 to 10 oz)  into it cuts the roast time almost in half to a brisk 13 to 15 minutes, with the first cracks starting at around the 9 minute mark and rolling cracks around the 11 minute mark. This certainly is going to help prevent Carpal Tunnel Syndrome down the road.

Getting away on me

While this preheating trick is a time saver, I found that too hot of a starting temperature can end up having your greens beans transmutate a bit too quickly. For instance, the other day I roasted up a batch of some 2009 Tanzanian Blackburn Estate that my friend had decided to keep around. I had let the popper preheat to 400 degrees before dumping which turned out to be a bit too much for this older batch of beans. The popping started way to early and I had to quickly dial down to maintain control. Fortunately, it was easy to do with the  Stove Top Whirly Pop and I managed to salvage the beans, dumping them in the skillet and cooling them off just as they hit the second crack.

The roast turned out okay, but not as good as it was back in the days. While green beans have a much longer shelf life than roasted beans, they are still not Twinkies. So my advice to all you hoarders out there: roast that shit. They will grow more.

Popcorn

Due to a complete misunderstanding involving a Tijuana Transgendered Hooker and a Mule, I have lying low at a friend’s house until things blow over and Univision finds some other story to follow. I had not planned far enough ahead to pack my Behmor Roaster, but thankfully my friend is a fellow coffee roasting enthusiast. Upon my arrival he presented me with a cooler full of beans that he never got around to roasting along with an old Whirly Pop Stovetop popcorn machine.

“Here, this shit will keep you out of trouble,” He said, “And maybe help payoff the bribe money I had to give to those crooked Tijuana Cops.”

I tried to tell that I had been set up that the whole thing had been the mule’s idea, but he did not really want to hear it. He did not care. All he knew was that I owed him big time and I was going to have to work it off by roasting up an assload of coffee beans with a Whirly Pop.

Talk about low tech

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This method of roasting beans is as primitive as you can get. No fancy ass roasting cycles, no automatic cool downs, no chaff collectors, no catalytic converters. No nothing. Just something to cook the beans in along with a little crank you need to constantly turn in order to keep the roast even. The only luxury that was afforded was a candy thermometer that my friend had managed to rig to it using a drill and a few well placed pieces of tinfoil.

“So get to roasting!” He demanded.

After drinking some of the swill that passed for coffee around the area, I understood my friend’s desperate circumstances. Even though the stash was almost two years old, it was still going to taste a lot fresher than the crap that was passing for coffees from the local Beanery. My own Fresh Roast  stash had run out too, so I was starting to get the itch.

Also, I was kind of curious what sort of roasts this rather primitive contraption was capable of putting out.

So I spent some time figuring out the exhaust, than began picking out the beans. I decided on a mix of Rwandan and Yemen beans for a Moka-Java like blend to start off with.  There was about 4oz left of each bean, so the expected yield was around 8 oz, enough to keep me in my friend rolling in beans for a day or two. I let the Whirly Pop warm up for a few minutes and then dumped the beans in and began to crank. I kept the flame at medium and began to crank. 24 minutes and a sore wrist later the roast was done. One of the beans took longer to crack than the other so the roast was uneven, but it was still okay.

Shit, it was still better than anything found on the outside.