Any of you nerds want to learn about roasting coffee?

I roast coffee for a living. I've done it in everything from a household popcorn popper to this sexy marvel of engineering. I've thought about posting on here about the process so ya'll can get some info on how it's done. Enough interested and I'll create some posts, even how to do it yourself cheap at home. For starters.. The image above is the green (unroasted) coffee loaded into the hopper. It is about to be dropped into the roasting drum.

The "yellowing" or drying phase in which the coffee begins to.. well.. turn yellow and dry out. We roasters aren't super clever with our terminology.

The trier spoon. It's a spoon to try the coffee (again with the terminology), so you can easily remove some coffee from the drum while roasting. This is helpful to see the color up close and to remove small samples. Those samples come in handy when you're trying to decide a roast profile for your coffee. The first few times we roast a new bean, we pull our coffee every 15 seconds once it hits a certain point to see which profile is best suited for that bean.

At this point, the coffee has reached its final phase in the roast and we empty the beans into the cooling pan. This is to ensure it doesn't continue to roast as the beans have now become exothermic. Once the beans have reached room temp, we bag em up and let them sit a few days. They need some time to let off a LOT of CO2 before they're drinkable. So there you go, I'll post more in-depth stuff if ya'll are into it.