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.