Hi, I'm Ed from Kansas City North ... - Introductions - Coffee Forum

I'm married, have one daughter who's going back to school, and I do network support for a large KC based company.  I love the outdoors, backpacking, climbing, skiing, snowboarding, biking, etc.  At one time I was a ski instructor up at Snow Creek.  I also play bass guitar and enjoy photography.

I've been roasting off and on for quite a while.  I started out with a West Bend Poppery II (popcorn popper), which would roast enough for one pot of coffee at a time.  This got old fast.  Eventually folks on coffeegeek.com were putting together SC/CO rigs, which is the bottom of a Stir Crazy popcorn popper with the heating element disabled and mods done to the stirrer, coupled with a Convection Oven top, which provided the heat.  I could roast about 1/3 pound of coffee at a time with this.  I managed to roast some really good coffees with this, including a blend for my Pavoni lever espresso machine.

I now roast using a RK Drum on a Char-Broil gas grill.  It is overhauled with a Dayton 30 RPM gear motor, and I load it with 2.5 lbs of green and end up with just over 2 lbs of roasted coffee.  I use a fan with some bolts in the grill which holds a stainless steel screen/container for cooling the beans.

Unfortunately I wore out my Pavoni several years back, having been through a couple of piston gaskets, etc., and is desperately in need of a complete overhaul.  So I'm relegated to auto drip thru a Capresso, pour over thru a Chemex, or the good ole french press.  I use a Kitchen Aid Proline Grinder for everything except espresso, and have a Rossi RR45 (I believe) grinder for espresso, which hasn't gotten any use and is also in need of some new burrs.

I made the trip to Benetti's roasting facility for the local home roasters event today, and enjoyed meeting Jason, Marty, and other KC home roasters along with Jeremy from Hacienda La Minita.  That was an interesting and informative event.  I like what Ben's doing for the local home roasters community, as we've been pretty much on our own, surfing for ideas on the internet.  It's nice to get together and share our experiences, what works, and what doesn't.  The idea of a local green coffee coop for green coffee distribution is a wonderful idea, and I hope it comes to fruition.

If you have any questions about my roasting process or rig, or just wanna chat, I can be reached at emalt3@gmail.com, on G+, and fb, although I typically don't "Like" commercial entities.  Not that I don't like stuff, I just don't want to be commercial …

After poking around for a bit, I guess I posted this in the wrong place.  Oops …

Here's a few pics of my roasting setup, and the Pavoni when it was working …

Lately I've been roasting http://coffeeshrub.com/shrub/c…..ra-jimma-0

I also have some http://coffeeshrub.com/shrub/c…..la-bisunga