Roast your own coffee for cheap!

Wow! I just discovered that its really easy to roast your own coffee at home! There are several websites selling coffee roasters for about $100-$200 (www.morebeer.com is one of them). I thought about that, but then I did a little poking on the internet, and I found that you can do it with a hot-air popcorn popper! I found the right kind at my local Goodwill, and paid 4 whole bucks. I then bought a pound of green Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans from MoreBeer (I was going there anyway for brewing supplies). Roasting took 15 minutes (including all the setup, the cleanup and stringing the extension cord outside and rolling it back up again when I was done). I had to do the roasting outside because the one downside to a popcorn popper is that it smokes like a chimney. Small price to pay - NOTHING compares to the coffee you roast yourself! For more information, also check out SweetMaria's.