Saving money on coffee

[ca2wi]

I recently switched from buying 10lbs bags of coffee beans in the supermarket to purchasing green beans online and then roasting them at home. It is much cheaper - green beans sell for about $4-$5/pound (versus $6/12oz in the store) and then you roast them at home. I use an old popcorn popper that I bought at a garage sale for $9.00!

[gakline]

Uh, that just doesn't sound right. (I also see that Jeffrey edited it). Roasting is a very intense process and using the air-roasting process, you need to get it over 400 deg F.

However if you really want to take the time and effort to do it. Here's a Link to do it right.

I think I'll just stick to buying roasted at the store. (where would you even find green beans?)

[BillsGirl]

I am addicted to the coffee I drink, it's so expensive but i can't switch!!!

[gakline]

I recently purchased an exotic brand really cheap, and now I'm hooked on the good stuff. I don't think I can go back to Folgers.

[amomof4]

Here's what I did to get my coffee costs cheaper:

I quit adding cream & sugar. It was hard at first. I would pour the coffee & it would just sit there until my cravings was stronger than the yuky taste. Eventually I acquired a taste. I would imagine you would have the same problem going from gourmet to regular stuff.

Later, I switched from caffienated to decaf. My consumption went from 5 pots a day down to 1 pot a day.

[CRFSaver]

My co-worker used to buy the coffee for the coffee maker I had in my cube so that was a cheap way for me to have coffee. now that he changed departments I have to buy my own. He was buying coffee at Trader Joes and it was quite good...

[rob62521]

I'm pleased to see so many are buying their own coffee and making it themselves instead of going to the coffee shops and paying huge prices. Wise folks you are!

[Bluezy]

How does the coffee taste using a popcorn popper? Roasting a coffee bean is not the same process as that.

[baselle]

Originally Posted by gakline

I recently purchased an exotic brand really cheap, and now I'm hooked on the good stuff. I don't think I can go back to Folgers.

I've had success in stretching the good stuff out - making pots of pretty good coffee using 1 or 2 scoop of the exotic, really good brand, the rest the cheap stuff. Of course the cheap stuff has to be merely weak and nondescript, not actively bad.

coffee is probably the most expensive grocery item BF and I buy. I buy an organic, fair-trade brand that is usually $AU8.50 per 250g and we go through that in 7-10 days.
we have always had a proper espresso coffee machine, or in the early days (5 years ago) we had a percolater. i just recently was given a really good 15 bar pump brand new sunbeam machine from my dad for my bday. now i only spend money on takeaway coffees when i'm out with people, or i will wait til i get home sometimes.

[Judi Dial]

If you have a local coffee roaster (we have 2 within an hour of us, in rural NH) you can usually buy green coffee from them. We started roasting coffee about a year ago as an experiment. It can be a lot of work, but it can also be satisfying.

btw, you CAN roast coffee in an old popcorn popper, we do it. We have a 2nd hand "Twirly Pop" that we got for $2 at a yard sale and a candy thermometer that we got new sits in it. This is a stovetop type.

Green coffee around here is roughly $5 a lb.

JKD

[Judi Dial]

Originally Posted by Bluezy

How does the coffee taste using a popcorn popper? Roasting a coffee bean is not the same process as that.

It tastes like coffee. What a popcorn popper does is heat up corn until the water in it explodes. When you roast coffee to a dark roast, you heat it up until it reaches "second crack" you can hear this when you're roasting, the coffee beans crackle. We don't eat popcorn, as my oral surgeon warned against it. (The hulls can get between your teeth and gums if you have gum disease; I do.) The popcorn popper is a converted coffee roaster and that's all.

It's similar, but not exactly the same. The best discussion of home roasting coffee I know of is on sweet marias website. As I'm a newbie, I can't publish links, but you can figure it out from there. They have discussions of using air poppers, twirly pops like ours, and other devices to roast coffee. They also sell supplies.

Judi