I spent a good part of this afternoon soon out on my deck in the gazebo with a soldering iron and screw driver as Max, MacKenzie and Maggie splashed in the pool. A couple of months ago I stumbled across this article on Engadget. It describes how to re-wire a hot-air corn popper into a coffee roaster. After an extended search for a suitable popper, I finally found one this week. If you haven’t bought a hot-air corn popper lately, you might be surprised by how hard they are to find. Evidently most people are going the microwave route these days. Personally I find that incredibly wasteful, since a box of six bags of microwave popcorn costs about the same as a big jar of Newman’s own popcorn that can make a lot bowls of popcorn.

Anyway the point of this was re-wire a popper into a coffee roaster. Evidently coffee beans begin to get stale and lose their flavor about five to six days after being roasted. And they degrade even faster after being ground. For several years now we have had a coffee maker with a built-in grinder and we buy whole bean coffee. I put the beans and water in, and the machine grinds the beans and then immediately brews the coffee. The difference compared to coffee that may have been ground days or weeks before is striking. Green beans can stay fresher for a lot longer and can also be bought for quite a bit less. As a coffee junkie, I love a good rich cup of coffee, and I drink it straight, no cream, no sugar, fully caffeinated. So I sacrificed a brand new popper to an experiment. So far it seems to be functioning correctly. Now I just need to get some beans and try some roasting. If I could grow my own coffee hear in Michigan I might try that next. I’ll let you know how the roasting turns out.