Anyone who knows me is well aware of my love for coffee. I think it's my favorite food (don't tell pasta I said that). Here's some amazing science - the best coffee is the freshest coffee. Ideally, you want to be grinding and brewing coffee within a day or two of roasting. After grinding, it all goes downhill rather quickly. But, we suffer in silence, scooping the months-old ground beans out of the big can.
...well, NO MORE!
Check out this handy instructional page on how to make your own coffee roaster out of a hot air popcorn popper. Pick up some green coffee beans and prepare yourself for the best cuppa' joe EVER!
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We're certain to get a snobbish reaction from Kirsten, here, about how her $5,000 Titanium Krups roaster is WAY cooler. ;-)
The hand crank stovetop popper method is probably a little cheaper and it is less modification-intensive. Sweet Maria's also has a how-to on this method. You just poke a hole in the lid for the thermometer, and that's it. My ex-husband and I got started with a $20 Whirly-Pop and a thermometer. The main problems were (1) you can't see inside the roaster to see how your beans look, (2) it was surprisingly hard to find a thermometer that went to a high enough temperature, and (3) there was a lot of smoke and chaff went everywhere.
I will brag about my $5000 gas-jet drum roaster one day, but I don't have one yet and I won't anytime soon. Right now I'm using a cute little FreshRoast Plus 8 Roaster I got for about $75 (including some free green beans) from a company which provided EXCELLENT customer service. I'd link to them here, but I'm not sure how you guys feel about commercial links (I am not affiliated with them in any way other than I'm a happy customer). If it's just about cost, I'd say it's probably worth it to just get a cheap little roaster like mine rather than go through all the trouble and expense of doing these mods (unless you just want to do all that for fun). In addition to saving time and possibly money, your roaster will be on warranty and probably be a lot safer, too.
But if you just go out and buy it you lose all the geek points for doing it yourself, even if it ends up costing three times as much in the end, requires a trip to the emergency room and 3 pints of blood.
That is both true, and an important consideration. But you could just make yourself some good coffee the easy way and then make up geek points by quoting Star Trek and The Karate Kid a lot more for the next few days, right?