SMF

I believe there have been a couple of threads in the past from those who caught the bug. I recently decided to try it out and found a store in Toronto that would sell me green beans at around half the price of roasted coffee beans in a supermarket. Shipping was free and so I have five assorted pounds of different coffees to play with. One factor in all this is the sad fact that it is very hard to buy decent beans here. The village supermarket stocked beans at my request, but they were dreadfully expensive fair-trade beans all fancy-schmancy boutique roasted. Lately they haven't been restocking the shelves, as only myself and a few come-from-away cottagers buy the damn things.
I don't have a proper coffee roaster, but I do have a hot air popcorn maker. It works, and it works surprisingly well. Lots of smoke and heat, but done outside (I'm not modern enough to have an extractor hood in the kitchen) it's fine and quite fun. I haven't yet stumbled across coffee-nirvana, but I'm making beans that taste pretty much as good as bought after two tries, and that was with Kenyan beans that I included in the order for nostalgic reasons. I don't think anyone regards Kenyan coffee particularly well except for those brought up in the era of Imperial Preference and Kenco Coffee. Once I have learnt something of how to go about it with these beans, I have four more pounds of more exotic coffees to play with.

The process is outlined in this video:

Price is so high. I need to buy a low cost product. I can buy a new Coffee Roaster Machine from [redacted].

Edit:
And I thought I'd give a new member from Turkey a chance. now he's spoiled things for anyone else from Turkey that applies to join. I keep a shitlist of countries from whence members have always been bots (machine or desperate human kind). We are not doing well with FSU states, the far east, the subcontinent or Africa.

C.

yikes...blast from the past

Chris, how did you do with the other four pounds you bought? More importantly, are you still roasting your own beans? Way back when, a few guys i knew were singing the praises of buying green beans, but they did theirs in a pan on the stove. Thanks for any update you can provide

I buy starbux verona now. for a long time i drank their italian blend but old age has me leaning towards a milder coffee.

clive

I graduated to a machine that is essentially a modified popcorn maker with built in timer and control of fan speed, a FreshRoast SR500. I buy green beans ten pounds at a time from buycoffeecanada.com and have stuck with their Columbian Supremo. It's no gourmet bean, and is quite cheap, but does well with a City or Full City roast. It turns out to be true that it doesn't much matter which bean you use if you are going to make it into a dark roast (Italian, French, Vienna) as they will all taste the same at that point. Burnt. Like Charbucks. A medium roast lets you taste flavours you would never know were there if you burn them out. I have played with green beans from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Honduras, Kenya, Sumatra and Ethiopia, but the Columbian beans are versatile and seem to not mind inexpert roasts. Tastes lovely and saves a lot of money, plus a pound of freshly home-roasted beans makes a nifty present for birthdays etc.

thanks for the medium roast tip....of course smf wouldnt be smf without the enabling and so roasters and beans will be on a truck heading my way soon THANKS!!

clive

Oh my - another rabbit hole.

What about the grind? I got a small hand operated burr grinder or Christmas - would that be enough to do the job for a full pot?

Inspired by this straightforward discussion, I've been mildly tempted to impulsively try one of the least expensive coffee grinders a few times, but it hasn't happened yet. Old lifelong habits are so hard to break, as someone once said.

brothers wrote: ↑Fri Apr 19, 2019 12:45 pm Inspired by this straightforward discussion, I've been mildly tempted to impulsively try one of the least expensive coffee grinders a few times, but it hasn't happened yet. Old lifelong habits are so hard to break, as someone once said.

Or as a little old Peruvian lady, 2000 miles up the Amazon, once told me: "It's hard to untwist an old tree!"

(She also taught me how to wash clothes by hand.)

- Murray

Oh yeah, coffee! Coffee was usually purchased there half-roasted, as it stored well in that form. One then roasted it in a bin over a fire to taste, boiled it, and served it with copious amounts of sugar. I gave up on trying to get it unsweetened. I once even watched some friends add the sugar during roasting, forming a glaze on the beans. Then they ground it up in what looked like a meat grinder with different plates on the front and boiled it.

Gene wrote: ↑Fri Apr 19, 2019 8:49 am Oh my - another rabbit hole.

What about the grind? I got a small hand operated burr grinder or Christmas - would that be enough to do the job for a full pot?

Sure, but eventually you might get tired of cranking it. If you use a French press there will be a lot less grinding as a very coarse grind is best for them.

My coffee machines have grinders built in - the old Saeco Vienna Plus keeps on going provided I replace some O-rings now and then. If it finally goes u/s I shall swap to my backup machine, a Breville Barista Express.

CMur12 wrote: ↑Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:32 pm
(She also taught me how to wash clothes by hand.)

- Murray

Oh yeah, coffee! Coffee was usually purchased there half-roasted, as it stored well in that form. One then roasted it in a bin over a fire to taste, boiled it, and served it with copious amounts of sugar. I gave up on trying to get it unsweetened. I once even watched some friends add the sugar during roasting, forming a glaze on the beans. Then they ground it up in what looked like a meat grinder with different plates on the front and boiled it.

Murray, did the process include boiling the clothes? I've seen films of women doing that, but have never considered the whole process. I think I know someone whose family lived on the farm almost a hundred years ago, and I am going to try to remember to ask her about it. I do recall her telling me it was considered almost a miracle when someone invented a mechanical clothes washer that ran on gasoline. Almost unbelievable to consider just how far "we" have come in the last hundred years. Good or bad?, that's the question!

Off topic, slightly: This thread reminds me of my childhood in a way. My parents had a hand crank coffee grinder that sat on our coffee table in the living room. It was a decoration of sorts, never used. I dimly recall my mother telling me as a very young boy that the iron in the mechanism was preserved by black shoe polish to keep it from rusting. The grinding mechanism sat upon a wooden box. We also had two small burlap sacks of roasted coffee beans that sat along side it. Merely a prop.

I remember playing with it as a kid and even grinding a few beans that had fallen out of a hole in one of those burlap sacks. My mom would scold me over it. That's about all I remember.

Fast forward to the modern day: I was in my mother's basement while visiting her recently and there upon a file cabinet I spied the old grinder (no burlap sacks full of coffee beans though). The iron was as black as it always was even though the basement is humid. It was like it was caught in a time-warp and my memories strayed to my childhood.

Mom is old now (83 years) and may not be long on this earth. She want's to give a lot away before the passes. I just may ask her for that grinder if only for nostalgia's sake.

Chris

EL Alamein wrote: ↑Sat Apr 20, 2019 7:00 pm Off topic, slightly: This thread reminds me of my childhood in a way. My parents had a hand crank coffee grinder that sat on our coffee table in the living room. It was a decoration of sorts, never used. I dimly recall my mother telling me as a very young boy that the iron in the mechanism was preserved by black shoe polish to keep it from rusting. The grinding mechanism sat upon a wooden box. We also had two small burlap sacks of roasted coffee beans that sat along side it. Merely a prop.

I remember playing with it as a kid and even grinding a few beans that had fallen out of a hole in one of those burlap sacks. My mom would scold me over it. That's about all I remember.

Fast forward to the modern day: I was in my mother's basement while visiting her recently and there upon a file cabinet I spied the old grinder (no burlap sacks full of coffee beans though). The iron was as black as it always was even though the basement is humid. It was like it was caught in a time-warp and my memories strayed to my childhood.

Mom is old now (83 years) and may not be long on this earth. She want's to give a lot away before the passes. I just may ask her for that grinder if only for nostalgia's sake.

Chris

There was one made of cast iron in my childhood home; I know now it was missing the bowl that sat around the crank that would hold the beans while they waited to drop down into the mechanism. The drawer in the bottom was used for petty cash, there was usually a ten shilling note or a few half crowns that it was understood I could use to pay the milkman or the like if my parents weren't home.

I could use to pay the milkman or the like

the good old days...not quite the same but with all the new delivery services spring up it's almost full circle (the more things change, the more thy stay the same??)

Happy Easter

clive

fallingwickets wrote: ↑Sun Apr 21, 2019 4:54 am

I could use to pay the milkman or the like

the good old days...not quite the same but with all the new delivery services spring up it's almost full circle (the more things change, the more thy stay the same??)

Happy Easter

clive

Clive now that you mention it, I see where we're going in our children's wild frenzy to escape the stupid old generation's realities and ways. Full speed ahead to the past!

The anti-vaxxers seems to think that way too. Just imagine if it were smallpox we hadn't quite eradicated rather than measles. People would be dying in thousands thanks to them. As far as I'm concerned the past is a lovely place, but best visited in memory. After all, the first patient to receive penicillin was an English policeman, who cut his face shaving and developed erysipelas (streptococcal cellulitis of the face). He responded very well, but then the supply ran out, he relapsed and died. I wouldn't want to go back there, thanks very much.

Agreed. The failure to learn from the past is usually a costly mistake. When I revisit the past in memory, depending on my mood, sometimes I choose only the good memories, but some days recalling the not-so-hot painful stuff is pretty unpleasant and always makes me very thankful we don't live back in the good old days.

brothers wrote: ↑Sat Apr 20, 2019 2:44 pm

CMur12 wrote: ↑Fri Apr 19, 2019 7:32 pm
(She also taught me how to wash clothes by hand.)

- Murray

Oh yeah, coffee! Coffee was usually purchased there half-roasted, as it stored well in that form. One then roasted it in a bin over a fire to taste, boiled it, and served it with copious amounts of sugar. I gave up on trying to get it unsweetened. I once even watched some friends add the sugar during roasting, forming a glaze on the beans. Then they ground it up in what looked like a meat grinder with different plates on the front and boiled it.

Murray, did the process include boiling the clothes? I've seen films of women doing that, but have never considered the whole process. I think I know someone whose family lived on the farm almost a hundred years ago, and I am going to try to remember to ask her about it. I do recall her telling me it was considered almost a miracle when someone invented a mechanical clothes washer that ran on gasoline. Almost unbelievable to consider just how far "we" have come in the last hundred years. Good or bad?, that's the question!

Gary, I never knew of anyone boiling clothes to get them clean where I was. At four degrees from the equator, that would be unreasonably hot work.

- Murray

Our Kenmore washer has hot and cold water options.

Murray, this is from someone almost 100 years old. The family had 11 children and lived on a farm out in western Oklahoma. On washday (Monday) the father built a fire outside in the yard under one of those enormous black cast iron kettles filled with water. The mother supervised while the older girls got the wash tub and the rinsing tub situated, with the rubbing board in the wash tub (of course). When the water got hot the father carried buckets of hot water to the wash tub where the clothes were aggressively rubbed on the rubbing board then tossed into the rinse tub, (I didn't find out if the rinse water was hot, but I'm guessing it was cold) then as we can imagine, rinsing the heavy wet clothes (overalls and sheets, for example) were manually wrung out before being placed on the clothes lines to dry. The mother made all of the soap from such things as lye and cooking grease, etc. I also learned that depending on where people lived in other areas, sometimes they just took the dirty clothes to the nearest creek to be washed. Nothing wrong with that. Better than going around in stinky clothes!

Actually, considering the topic of roasting coffee beans, I forgot to inquire, but if my source is willing I'll try to find out where the coffee came from, and how did they grind it. Hopefully soon.

After checking with my reliable source of early western prairie farm living, I learned that ground coffee was sourced along with the other staples such as flour and beans. It was available at the nearest mercantile stores in bulk bags made of cotton or burlap. One can create an image we've all seen in movies about the chuck wagons that followed the cowboys when driving cattle across long distances. The cook was expected to make beans, biscuits and coffee for the guys that did the work. The farm families had hungry mouths to feed every day, as the never-ending work was hard and not limited to dad and mom, it was the kids (girls as well as boys) working, picking and pulling cotton and chopping weeds up and down the rows in the hot sun alongside their parents. [Note: when I was younger than 10 or thereabouts, my dad and I went to help my granddad pull his cotton one day. I distinctly remember being the most thirsty I have ever known in my life.]