The new level of addiction...

Okay, so this is the situation. I have come to terms with my coffee additction. I did that in a paper that I wrote for a class while getting my teaching license. I have gone through all the steps of getting in over my head with this . From the social reinforcement (peer -pressure) to actually working in a coffee shop (pusher) to roasting the green coffee beans to the consumable goodness that they become (producer). I believe that I have reached another level to this maddness.

I had stopped roast coffee for Dunn Bros. (see links) back in Dec. It just felt like the time to move on. I was also in the process of filling out these applications for UNL. So, I was looking online for coffee shops in Lincoln this past winter and I discovered this whole group of people that roast coffee in their homes. Now, really this is nothing new. A friend of mine bought a personal roaster and she had been roasting for a while. I had looked into this as I thought about business opportunities, but they are quite expensive and, at the time, I was content with roasting for the store. I discovered using an air popcorn popper.

I purchased one through that lovely site called Ebay. Oh, the crap that I have spent my money on there, but that is a subject for another blog entery. It came yesterday and the sending address was from here in Lincoln which is good . I was too busy getting the wedding rings taken care of yesterday to actually use the new toy. So today was the big test drive. I grabbed some raw (green) beans from the kitchen that had made the trip from Minneapolis down here. This selection was the Kenya AA. I am not sure of the estate or farm that they came from, but I know that it paid off to teach a lesson on world econ using coffee, hence the free, raw beans from the Dunn Bros. I headed down into the basement.

The basement is a funny place. I had spent a little bit of time cleaning it up before the washer was put in so it isn't as dusty. I think I got all of the ciggarette butts, but regardless it still smells like stale smoke down there. The mom who lives downstairs smokes and with the central air exchanger down there, all of her old air gets put down there (It think that's how it works). I can get used to it fairly quickly. When the dryer goes it smells nice, though. I set up on the washer and dryer, since that was where most of the light was in my new concrete kitchen. I put the beans in, watched them spin around, and watched the smoke from the beans fill up my area. It smelled so good. Like the old days. The beans roasted a lot quicker than with the big machines that I used to working with, but the development looked good. A nice brown color with good plumping happening. I think next time I will wait a little bit longer for these beans to develop before turning off the heat. The center crease was still a bit white. It needed to mature some more into second crack. The sweet thing about the popcorn popper/roaster is that it has a toggle switch to turn on and off the heating element. It is really helpful to begin the cooling process, but I can see that I will have to work on other ways to continue the cooling.

Now, the moment of truth....The tasting of the brew. It was good and I could tell that that it needed to develop more. All in all, it was a good first time. Tasted better than the Starbuck's beans that I had to break down and buy during the wait.

Basically, I have gone from cooking up the caffine in a legitamate business to cooking it up in a seedy, stale-smoke smelling, turn-on-the-lights-by-pulling-the-sting-and-don't-mind-the-cobwebs basement. If I had to I could move it, so there is the potential to be portable. I could move the production to a motel room or a trailer park. Me and the meth labs.

I am Mr. Peabody and I am a caffine addict.