Starbuck’s is now offering free Wi-Fi at it’s US and Canadian Stores (click here to find a Starbuck’s location). This is a one click entry so you can forget abou
t needing a user name & password to get on. Future plans call for the roll-out in the fall of 2010 of the Starbuck’s Digital Network. This will be a collaboration with Yahoo and promises to offer some exclusive content and access to paid sites.
This together with McDonald’s Free Wi-Fi (restaurant locator here) always guarantees you a place to work and consume caffeine.
I had a discussion with Courtney who is new to home coffee roasting. So far so good she reports … she loves home roasting coffee and her beans do brew an excellent cup. Anyway I wanted to learn her thought processes in selecting her newly purchased home coffee roasting machine.
Basically, she said that she conducted some Internet research and quickly dismissed the hot air roasters. The reason being their reputation to produce an uneven roast. Apparently, some beans are exposed to a greater amounts of heat during the roasting process than others. And this is an especially serious problem if you’re going for the darker roasts. .. With this eliminated she turned to the drum roasters. The two primary considerations here were the capacity of the machine and it’s cost. As a happy medium she decided on the Behmor 1600. This machine is capable of roasting up to three quarters of a pound of green coffee beans and with a $300 price tag it was a reasonable piece of equipment that didn’t break her budget.
Now about two months in she finds herself roasting beans about twice per week which is fine with her. On the negative side she found that the machine’s interlocks prevents her from getting the especially dark roasts which she craves. To get around this she uses various tricks to get more out of the machine (such as inputting that she is roasting more beans than she actually is to provide additional BTU’s/ounce of coffee beans).
As an engineer I’m not a big fan of overriding interlocks. The machine is designed with certain safety factors to be sure but she may be pressing the limits of the equipment’s motor, heat source and insulation. Maybe she’ll be OK but then again maybe the machine will experience premature failure (or, dread the thought, a fire hazard could be in the works). … Anyway here’s my prediction, as home roasting really takes off better machines within Courtney’s price range will be introduced, at which time she’ll trade up making the both of us happier.
We’ll do a full detailed review of the Behmor 1600 as well as taste testing Courtney’s Roasted Coffee Beans in future posts.
We did a profile of a small organic coffee roaster on one of our sister sites (www.organictestkitchen.com). In it we looked at some of the considerations and trends in the fresh roast coffee business. The complete article is here.
