*Gasp!* They've gone to plaid!
It's amazing how a former pasta pot can enable you to imagine a new future for yourself.
If that didn't make any sense, I guess I haven't talked to you much about my new coffee roaster design. I've been struggling with the 1/4lb limit on my modded popcorn popper for some time now, especially now that some friends have begun asking when I'm roasting again whenever I see them.
It's become clear over the last six months or so that a popper-turned-roaster is fine, as long as you're only ever roasting for yourself. Otherwise, you'll quickly find the time you have alotted for sleep is diminishing, as you spend more time emerging from the garage with chaff in your hair and smelling like a big coffee bean.
Struggling with this limitation, I concluded some time ago that I had to build a bigger roaster. I'm happy to announce that my first proof of concept is complete as of this weekend. This isn't just the next stride in my coffee roasting technology; it's more like progressing directly from a lopsided wheel to a rocket engine. My coffee-roasting capacity is no longer a miniscule pound per hour. Now, I've got the technology to roast about 16 pounds per hour! Of course, this is still somewhat theoretical, since I don't have a need to produce 16 pounds of coffee at any one time. However, it seems completely reasonable given the materials involved and the degree to which I had to slow down my initial prototype in order to roast batches in the one pound range.
To explain the first line of this post: my new roaster is a drum made of an old pasta pot insert, suspended on a shaft in my BBQ grill. This is just the first functional step in a larger design that I hope will result in a well-insulated, efficient roaster which is a completely self-contained unit (rather than requiring the partial disassembly of my grill every time I want to roast). I'm planning to convert an old charcoal grill to form the body of the roaster, but I wanted to prove that the fundamental technology would work first.
Now, I feel completely comfortable with the idea of asking people to reimburse me for my expenses - like the green beans - when I give them roasted beans. You may ask why I never did this before. I suppose it has to do with the enjoyment I get from sharing something I found so shockingly refreshing when I discovered it myself. But part of it is definitely this idea that if you ask someone to pay for something, they won't hesitate to ask for more, as long as they feel the price is acceptable. It takes the goodwill and community aspect out of the equation. At this point, I'm okay with having interactions like that, since I can roast enough to satisfy those people, in addition to supplying myself and my friends.
Who knows, maybe I'll take a little trip down to the farmer's market someday soon...