January 2026

A home roasting setup on a budget

People sometimes assume you need a proper drum roaster to get into this, which is a good way to talk yourself out of ever starting. Here's what we're actually using, almost two years in, and what it cost us.

The roaster itself

A secondhand stovetop popcorn popper, the hand-crank kind, bought used for not very much. We modified nothing — it's exactly what it was designed for, just with green coffee instead of kernels. It's slow, it's a bit uneven if you're not paying attention, and it works.

Cooling

Two mixing bowls and a box fan. Dump the beans into one bowl, stir with your hand while the fan blows across them, transfer to the second bowl once they're stopped visibly steaming. That's the whole system.

Measuring

A kitchen scale we already owned, and a cheap instant-read thermometer for checking bean temperature at a few points during the roast — not strictly necessary but it made our notes a lot more useful once we had actual numbers instead of "medium heat, a while."

What we'd actually recommend spending on

Honestly, ventilation before equipment. Roasting produces a surprising amount of smoke and chaff, and the single best upgrade we made wasn't a better roaster — it was finally roasting next to an open window with the box fan pointed outward instead of doing it in a closed kitchen. Learned that one the hard way.