Coffee junkies will understand...

Hi, my name is Vic and I am a coffee junkie... (Crowd : Hi Vic!)
Yeah, it got worse too, when I discovered that coffee tastes even better when it's fresh, as in, freshly roasted on one's own deck, freshly ground 24hrs after roasting, and that it was cheaper to roast your own than to buy store coffee at $8+/lb.

So...I found a great place to order green beans from (www.sweetmarias.com), where they have a lot of info on roasting coffee at home. I was in bean-heaven, let me tell you! I got a Fresh Roast roaster, and did really well, until one colder than chilly day, I couldn't get the beans as dark as I liked, so I did the cardboard box trick...and toasted my roaster! Scratch one roaster.

Got it repaired. It died. Repaired. It died again. New Fresh Roast. It died. Now, don't go thinking that Fresh Roast makes a bad roaster-- 'cause they don't. I am just hard on roasters I guess, probably because I like my coffee dark, dark enough to dissolve your stirring spoon! So after 5 or so repairs/replacements, I decided to try something else.

I tried cheap store coffee. In a word...YUCK! Even expensive store coffee does not compare. I tried. Really, I did! If it came to the end of the world as we know it, I could manage to drink store coffee, but I would not enjoy it.

Finally I decided to try the air-popper method on green beans. Picked one up cheap on Fleabay, and voila! Fresh Roasted Coffee again! It's a bit more labor intensive to air-pop your beans. There's no timer cut off, so you have to watch it the whole time. It is more sensitive to cold temps outside, where I roast to avoid the smoke getting in the house.

And then yesterday...disaster struck! As I moved the roaster to the counter, the power cord snagged on a kitchen chair, pulling the unit out of my hand! It smashed on the floor, doing serious damage to the casing! It basically shattered. Not again! I thought...So I grabbed the fire extinguisher, loaded the beans into the roaster anyway, and sat outside, waiting to see if it self destructed on the deck (hence the fire extinguisher), or if it would even run.

Well, luck was with me, and it DID run like normal (a bit noisier though), and more importantly, it did not self destruct! So I have coffee today. :)