The (New) Economics of Home Coffee Roasting
Posted by TheShot on 05 Jan 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Home Brew, Roasting
Just a few years ago, for a variety of reasons, we were avid and regular home coffee roasters. Today we still occasionally roast our own coffee at home, but we find far fewer reasons to do so — and we find ourselves doing it much less often. The reasons for this change are partly personal. But they mostly reflect significant shifts over the past few years behind the motivations for home coffee roasting.
A little home roasting history…
Home roasting remains something of an oddity in the world of quality coffee, akin to the high school chess club even among coffee geeks. For example, there are several online communities for home roasters — most have been around for years — and yet rarely do they interact with the many other online communities devoted to baristas, consumer coffee, and the coffee trade (and vice versa). We’ve found meatspace communities to operate much the same way.
Why? We can only guess that many home roasters tend to dwell in the odd margins of prosumers: too esoteric for most layman consumers, and yet not commercial enough for the professionals to take notice. But it wasn’t always that way. In fact, in many countries home coffee roasting was the norm up until World War II. In America, the convenience of coffee pre-roasted outside the home didn’t even catch on until the late 1800s.
When we started home roasting around the turn of the millennium, we did so because it uniquely solved a big problem with home espresso. With espresso being particularly sensitive to the age of the roast, we needed a small-but-steady supply of fresh-roasted coffee beans that were less than a week old.
Because we consumed most of our espresso shots outside the home at the time, our home coffee turnover ran as low as a pound every 2-3 weeks — making small-batch (micro-batch?) lots rather attractive. The few roasters with relatively fresh supplies often sold by the pound. As for the decent roasters that allowed you to purchase smaller supplies in bulk? They typically stored their roasts in open bins that visually looked good in retail locations but fully exposed their coffee to days of rapid oxidation (and hence rapid staleness).
Like many other home roasters, we took the plunge for freshness, variety, and small batch sizes. And since you can typically buy green coffee beans at about half the price of their roasted versions, other home roasters pursued it as a way to save money. Or do you?
The cost savings myth
Given these economic times where industry trade mags read like a dirge for the café and quality coffee, some of the apocalyptic retail coffee prophesies out there include suggestions of a mass movement towards home roasting (e.g., Coffee Talk‘s “State of the Industry” editorial [7.8Mb pdf, pg. 10] published this month).
Of course, we’ve recently ruffled quite a few feathers among the personal finance malpractice industry — calling the bluff of a bevy of personal finance lemmings posters who regurgitated the home espresso machine savings myth. (Save that myth for the Starbucks marketing gurus hawking home espresso equipment on their cafés’ expensive retail shelf space. Someone has clearly done the math, and our money is on Starbucks determining their customer lifetime value long before any wannabe wonk thought about the economics of home espresso machines.)
Just as with the home espresso machine savings myth, the fly in home roasting’s economic ointment is labor: home roasting takes a bit of work and energy. This time investment is readily dismissed by those who love the craft, but then there’s a reason most of us don’t feel the loving zen of changing our own motor oil. Regularly flossing your teeth may seem like a small time commitment, but millions of people would gladly cough up a few bucks every month if there was a way to make the need simply go away.
As always, your mileage may vary. We started with a detailed database of each test roast (a system prototype for CoffeeRatings.com no less), adjusted various controls for time and temperature, etc. But these days, we’re more than a bit slapdash; we’re lucky to avoid getting distracted and burning the house down.
As for freshness, variety, and small batches…
Over the past few years, the financial incentives of home roasting haven’t changed. However, the freshness and variety of roasted coffees available to consumers have changed dramatically.
We had a good conversation about this with Christian of Man Seeking Coffee fame — during our joint review of Dynamo Donuts. Before the advent of Blue Bottle Coffee, almost no one dared date stamp their roasts. So the only way consumers could be sure they were getting coffee roasted less than a week old was to roast it themselves.
Today, the practice of date-stamping coffee roasts is expected among the better roasters. A week ago we walked into the Bi-Rite grocer, and we could pick up a half-pound bag of Guatemalan or Ethiopian beans from Ritual Coffee Roasters — roasted just a few days prior. A small neighborhood café such as Cafe Bello offers a daily special of a same-day roast for a mere $8 per pound.
Healdsburg’s Flying Goat Coffee, for example, will take your order online, roast it to order, and ship it to you within a couple of days. Vancouver, Canada’s 49th Parallel Roasters will FedEx roasted-to-order coffee virtually overnight to most anywhere in North America. And some roasters, such as Ritual and Blue Bottle, even offer roasted coffee subscriptions, delivered to your door.
With roasted-to-order Cup of Excellence coffees now available with the click of a mouse, what upside is left to the art of home roasting?
When home roasting still matters
Today the motivations for home roasting are far less compelling than they were just a few years ago — at least for most consumers. Still, there are still solid reasons why home roasting still makes sense:
- Pre-roasted blends and experimentation
- Access to hard-to-find beans
- Convenient access to fresh-roasted coffee
- Got some spare time?
- Like making your own wine or beer?
Some coffee lovers want to experiment with different blends. And many coffee varietals contribute better to blends at different roast levels. This despite the current industry fad to roast most everything at a medium roast level, regardless of the type and origin of the bean involved. (If we hear one more roaster utter the brain-dead proclamation, “We only roast our coffee to medium roast, because that’s best,” we’re going to scream.)
This is one of the biggest motivators. Despite the greater variety of coffees available from quality roasters, their selection simply pales in comparison to the inventory at a Sweet Maria’s, for example. Some bean stocks, let alone roast styles, are clearly out of vogue among retail roasters. For example, today there’s a huge emphasis on single origin beans — leaving a major market gap for a variety of interesting blends to be used for espresso or other brewing methods.
One of our favorite varietals for home roasting is Maui Moka for its intense, unrivaled chocolaty flavor. This living dinosaur of a varietal may cost $23 a pound green, but it’s worth the extra cost and roasting effort on occasion, because it’s pretty hard to find — fresh-roasted or not.
Although fresh roasts are more widely available, you might not always want to rely on the postal service to get them. Furthermore, if your home coffee turnover rate is rather low, the expense of regularly shipping micro lots of the stuff suddenly makes the financial savings argument of home roasting much more compelling.
If you’re out of work or school and are interested in the process, home roasting becomes more appealing. When considering the labor costs, in some situations your time might be worth the investment — especially when you compare it with the costs of having a coffee subscription delivered regularly. Even so, the margins are still too thin on inexpensive green coffee beans to justify home roasting purely for financial reasons. Hence we suggest that if you’re going to bother with home roasting at all, deal only with higher quality green beans.
These days consumers have never had so much interest in quality food and yet felt so distant from its production. If you’re the type that likes to get their hands dirty to learn something new once in a while, home roasting is worth a shot. At least as a short-term strategy until you move on to your next hands-on project.
UPDATE: Feb. 9, 2011
Despite the fact that home coffee roasting has gone from an active Internet community on newsgroups and online forums to a trickle today of what it used to be, the mainstream media seems to have just “discovered” home roasting and continue to proclaim that it’s some growing DIY fad: The Ultimate DIY: Roasting Your Own Coffee – San Jose Mercury News.
A decade ago, many home consumers of quality coffee had no choice but to roast their own for freshly roasted coffee. Today, with so many quality options now stamped with roasting dates, the need has greatly diminished. This has lead to a long decline in the home roasting community, which is now dominated by a few new DIY curiosity seekers and a more limited handful of die-hards. Neither of which spells sustained growth for this community.
6 Comments »
Hey Greg, great, very detailed piece. I especially agree with the last point – it certainly seems the one most compelling to me.
One other reason I’d add – a kind of a supplement to your first two- is decaf coffee. While decafs have improved, it seems like they are still a couple of years behind where all these tasty, new roasters are presently with their caffeinated beans. Not that home roasting will ever be able to overcome the inherent limitations of the decaffeination process, but it does give you more selection of different types of beans and the opportunity to customize the roast level of the same beans you probably already enjoy. Of course, that’s just a thought for those of us who actually want to drink decaf coffee!
Happy New Year, Christian.
Decaf is a good example. Quality decaf coffees are getting easier to find these days, even though the selection is far more limited than with the normally caffeinated variety. By turning to home roasting, that should open up the varietal options even further.
And you definitely know my stance on decaf coffee. While caffeine plays an integral role in the flavor enhancement of coffee (and hence why Duncan Hines is the third largest consumer of purified caffeine in the world), the idea that coffee is pointless without caffeine comes more from coffee users than coffee appreciators. Which is why we believe decaf coffee fans are some of the truest coffee lovers out there.
[...] Well, looks like the roasting plan will be put on hold for awhile…at least until we acquire a well-ventilated garage/basement. I just came across this very detailed piece on The (New) Economics of Home Coffee Roasting. [...]
great article Greg. Of course, if you can assemble a group of like minded people together and purchase a machine between the group that can be shared around, the economic argument may get stronger, and, its a great way of sharing an interest.
I live a mere four blocks from one of the nation’s best roasters, Metropolis of Chicago. Yet I still mostly roast my own (I buy pre-roasted from them when I am out of drinkable espresso and the stuff I roasted hasn’t out-gassed yet; and I buy their unroasted espresso blend when I am out of my faves from Sweet Maria’s or some important components of my own espresso blend and don’t want to wait for the Postal Service. Why? Because in my case, there’s still a definite cost saving. In Chicago, most freshly roasted beans still cost $12 or more per pound. Sweet Maria’s prices for most varietals and blends averages between $5-6.50 per pound. Even though a pound of “greens” yields only about 13 oz. of roasted beans, it’s still cheaper than regularly buying fresh pre-roasted. I have a Behmor drum roaster–at $300, it can do anywhere from 1/4 to 1 lb., and I can multitask as long as I am around to hear first and second crack and hit the “cool” button. But the best part is the experimentation and the convenience of having the stuff around–in less than the time it takes me to walk or even drive to (and park at) Metropolis, I have a pound of coffee as fresh or fresher than what I can buy, at almost half off the price of pre-roasted.
And as to the espresso machine, I drink at least three or four double espressos, espresso drinks (reg. or decaf) a day. My prosumer machine paid for itself in less than a year, if you consider what a quality cafe like Metropolis or Intelligentsia charges. (Starbucks? Only when I need to get caffeinated in the airport or along the tollways).
Thanks, Sandy. We’re definitely familiar with Metropolis, though it’s been a while since our last visit.
Our point about any home roasting cost savings is that it’s not much when compared to the time investment (equipment and power aside). Here in SF it is typical to find high-end coffees for $12-16 per pound that you can find at Sweet Maria’s green for $5-8 per pound. Having a larger capacity roaster and consuming a lot more coffee in a given period does help the equation, however.
But even with multi-tasking, it’s still work. We lost count of the number of times we’ve multi-tasked ourselves into a Full Charcoal roast because of inattentiveness. Better roasting equipment will help prevent that. But still, given whatever slight cost savings, it’s hardly the kind of profit that would make someone start their own roasting company out of their home from all the extra cash they’ve pocketed.
As for the freshness, you still have to let the fresh roasts gas out many hours, if not a few days. So you still have to plan ahead and wait – as much as we wish perfectly de-gassed coffee can come out of our tap, on demand, once we started home roasting.
And as for any cost savings with a prosumer machine, it’s still about committing a lot of money up-front and regular time and labor on a regular basis to do it right. For people who place a high value on their time to do other things – even if it’s just reading a book – the lack of convenience just isn’t worth it. And let’s face it, in a nation where people gladly pay more for pre-mixed salads and pre-sliced apples, we’re generally too lazy as a population to do much of anything for ourselves. Exceptions excluded, of course, as you certainly seem to be one among the few.
All of which is why we think home espresso and home roasting is best when you don’t just buy the cheap stuff and try to skimp your way and value your time at McDonald’s wages. To exhume that ever-popular wine analogy: what’s the point of making your own boutique wine if you’re gunning for a 7-Eleven Chardonnay and some extra pocket change? If it’s worth your time, it’s worth making something of semi-rare quality.