Hello! I've been roasting my own coffee for several years now and it's a lot of things. Mostly it's easier than you think, requires next to no equipment invested, and is a good thing for both food literacy and the Faustian DIY spirit. It's the easiest and cheapest way to get the good stuff for the price of the cheap stuff. It would make me feel fantastic to introduce some more people to it as I've already produced two diehard converts. --LET'S GIVE ER THE BEANS-- Coffee shrubs and the beans that grow from them require acidic soil, tropical daylight amounts, and high elevation to grow well enough to produce decent beans, the same reason people want apples from Washington and peaches from Georgia, nature's just conducive that way. What this means is every single country that makes coffee is a tropical banana republic shithole, full of black or brown shitholistanis (obviously Hawaii is no exception). They're all violent and primitive to a certain degree, there's no way around it short of occupation and that's not PC anymore or something. The closest anyone ever got was Venezuela for a short time, or Panama, but (((yeah))). Coffee farmers are small potatoes individually and the quality can vary wildly from one farm to it's neighbor in most places, because it's third world. The modern solution to this is to use farmers' co-ops as regional processing centers for preparing and bagging the beans and labor unions to teach decent farming techniques and negotiate wages/prices to export/importers, with dozens to hundreds of growers selling their cherries to this regional co-op. Let's look at a bag label to interpret it: Guatemalan-from squatemala obviously. Fluff words-might say something like premium or limited here. This may denote a special run, maybe not, check the importer's website. Region-this bag says Huehue for Huehuetenago (sp), the general growing region the coffee's from. Co-op-this bag says "Las Plantas", the name of the co-op within the growing region the beans were processed/sold out of. Variety-there are several varieties or strains of coffee. This bag is Finca, but there can be typica, gesha, and others. Individual farm-this bag is La Esperanza, some bags may not have that info, but generally there is an agreement between growers and co-ops to show pride in their products. Processing method-This bag actually doesn't say but there are many ways to process coffee, and the big debate is what works best-they all work and yield relatively similar results so don't get hung up on any one attribute. The big difference is whether or not the cherries(fruit with 2 beans in it) are allowed to rest/ferment, soak in water, both, neither, whatever before they're pulped and the beans extracted and dried. Generally a farm has been growing and prepping it's beans a certain way for many generations, as there's a substantial equipment change to change that. Price-there are coffees that are north of $25/lb unroasted, like hawaiian Kona or jamaican blue mountain varieties. It's not worth that much, the pinapple and weed niggers are gouging you. Stick to the $5-8/lb varieties and I can promise you'll find many that are so good you'll wonder how you could do better. Stick to a good importer in the US and I can also say firsthand it's hard to buy truly shitty coffee, I've maybe found 2 lots out of well over 100 "just ok" Learning-I learned everything I needed to know about roasting from the Sweet Maria's website. They're a great resource for that and keep it simple, but even they make it sound harder than it is. I would compare the difficulty to listening and smelling for popcorn in the microwave to be done, maybe a little harder. Same senses and cues involved. A note on sweet maria's-They strike me as pretty hippy dippy, gauze and granola types. They keep their farm notes short, vague, and full of participation trophies. Where I buy my coffee is Burman coffee traders, but there are many others out there. They're pretty brutally honest with their farm notes, read their section on Papua new Guinea coffees if you want to come away grateful and proud to be a White in the West. Even still, most of these plantation and co-op owners are White or high stepping castizos for obvious reasons. Roasting equipment-Don't let some soyboy tell you that you need a "real" roaster that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars, he wants to gain some self righteous feeling or keep you buying from him. All you need to do is keep the beans moving and surround them with several hundred degrees F of convected air. It'll be a little uneven, but you can even use an iron or steel skillet on a medium stove as long as you keep the beans moving by using a whisk or shaking the skillet. My suggestion is a "whirley pop" or similar stovetop popcorn popper. It's just an aluminum pan with a stirring stick geared into the bottom of it that can agitate the beans very well. Stovetop, medium heat, 10ish minutes, and you've got about 1/2 lb done. Alternatively, you can use a heat gun, especially one with adjustable temp like a rheostat on it, but then you need a chimney to contain the beans in. Sweet maria's has an example buried somewhere in their roaster section. Distant second to the whirley-pop in how much it can do at once. My "lessons learned" roasting-Once you pour the beans in your hot convection method of choice and begin agitating, it'll seem like nothing's happening for a good few minutes, this is normal. Soon, if your setup lets you see this, you'll notice the beans have turned slightly tan instead of green and are beginning to shed their outer paper like chaff. Hot burning grassy smell and steam too. No big deal, keep going as this means the roast is coming along. Keep them moving, and in a couple more minutes you'll notice the beans are browning up more and you start hearing cracks just like popcorn popping. The smell here is fantastic, and unique to roasting coffee. This is called first crack, and it's also a good sign. Keep them moving to keep it even. After a couple minutes of the cracking, it starts to fade in frequency just like popcorn in the microwave-it's not done yet, keep stirring. Your nose will pick up more typical coffee notes here, caramel, chocolate, cinnamon. If your heat level is in the right zone (slightly different among coffees but medium heat is a good place to start) about 30 seconds after the last crack or two end, you start to hear the beginnings of what sounds like the crackling of rice krispies in milk. This is second crack, and about as far as you can go and still get a nice unique profile out of your particular coffee, so dump it onto a cookie sheet or something to cool right away. I would say this is a very good zero point to adjust forward or backward from to see what notes you like the best out of a particular coffee. A little darker tends to mask the more volatile, flowery, nosey notes but gives you a more agreeable coffee that primarily tastes like, well, coffee. Starcucks and Black Kikel coffee takes this to the extreme and just burns the shit out of their cheap beans. I think once you try within the range of dumping and cooling immediately on start of second crack, or a few seconds after the first crack seems to have stopped (full city and city roasts respectively) you'll almost never wish you'd roasted darker. That's all I know about roasting my own, feel free to ask anything or tell me I'm fucking it all up :)