And for many people, that’s where it ended. They pursed their lips and decided that coffee isn’t for them. Or they fell into a big pot of stale, hours-old coffee and never climbed back out again.
You started to notice where the beans were coming from, the other flavors in there. You started working out what you liked. You bought a burr grinder and a coffee machine and started making coffee at home.
Before you knew it, you had a semi-automatic machine, and every day now starts with the whirr of freshly ground coffee. You’re making microfoam, looking for single-estate beans, chasing that elusive last step to the perfect cup.
Then it hits you. You could roast the beans yourself.
Eyes bright with the slight mania only ever seen in enthusiastic hobbyists, you start to go over the benefits of home coffee roasters:
You get complete control over everything. Short of growing the beans yourself, this is the most you’ll ever be able to influence how the final cup tastes.
Your coffee is always going to be freshly roasted.
Green coffee keeps for over a year without a noticeable decline in flavor.
You’ll often get more coffee for your money if you’re roasting it yourself.
Critically-acclaimed and much-loved, the Behmor 1600 Plus drum roaster can roast up to 1 lb of beans at a time. That's the largest capacity among home roasters and is ideal for true coffee enthusiasts.
The Fresh Roast SR-540 has 4 oz capacity and is the successor to the popular SR-500. It maintains everything people loved about the original while adding additional heat and speed options.
The Nuvo Eco Manual Ceramic Roaster lets almost anyone roast coffee in their own home. Toss in your green coffee beans, find a heat source, and roast away. It makes roasting low-cost and accessible but much harder.
What's best for us may not be best for you. Let's expand upon the Top Picks above and highlight a few more of the Best Home Coffee Roasters by category:
Not sure which is right for you? The next section should help...
3 Tips When Buying
The Coffee Maven's Official Rankings
Before we get to the individual Best Home Coffee Roaster reviews, let's take a look at the rankings.
Critically-acclaimed and much-loved, the Behmor 1600 Plus drum roaster can roast up to 1 lb of beans at a time. That's the largest capacity among home roasters and is ideal for true coffee enthusiasts.
This is a drum roaster with a twist. Instead of being heated by its own internal element, the Kaldi Drum Roaster is heated by a burner for better electric efficiency. However, its design makes it hard to monitor progress.
The Fresh Roast SR-540 has 4 oz capacity and is the successor to the popular SR-500. It maintains everything people loved about the original while adding additional heat and speed options.
The Nuvo Eco Manual Ceramic Roaster lets almost anyone roast coffee in their own home. Toss in your green coffee beans, find a heat source, and roast away. It makes roasting low-cost and accessible but much harder.
Yes, the Hamilton Beach 73400 is a popcorn popper. Also yes, you can use it to roast coffee beans at home. You don't get any temp control or fancy features, but it gets the job done at an eye-popping price point.
Critically-acclaimed and much-loved, the Behmor 1600 Plus drum roaster can roast up to 1 lb of beans at a time. That's the largest capacity among home roasters and is ideal for true coffee enthusiasts.
This is a drum roaster with a twist. Instead of being heated by its own internal element, the Kaldi Drum Roaster is heated by a burner for better electric efficiency. However, its design makes it hard to monitor progress.
The Fresh Roast SR-540 has 4 oz capacity and is the successor to the popular SR-500. It maintains everything people loved about the original while adding additional heat and speed options.
The Nuvo Eco Manual Ceramic Roaster lets almost anyone roast coffee in their own home. Toss in your green coffee beans, find a heat source, and roast away. It makes roasting low-cost and accessible but much harder.
Nuvo Eco Manual Ceramic Roaster Features & Specifications
It works equally well on a naked flame or on an electric stove element, so you can just pump the extractor hood to maximum and roast your beans in the kitchen.
You will, of course, have to agitate the beans yourself to ensure an even roast. This can be a fun, theatrical experience that wows guests and lets you feel a bit closer to the process. Or it can be irritating. It depends on your personal preference.
The main issue with this roaster is timing. You’ll need a few tries to really get an idea for how quickly it browns the beans. The design makes checking them mid-roast distinctly difficult, so you’ll generally have to be guided by your intuition and that tell-tale first crack.
Nuvo Eco Manual Ceramic Roaster Pros
Nuvo Eco Manual Ceramic Roaster Cons
Nuvo Eco Manual Ceramic Roaster Features & Specifications
It works equally well on a naked flame or on an electric stove element, so you can just pump the extractor hood to maximum and roast your beans in the kitchen.
You will, of course, have to agitate the beans yourself to ensure an even roast. This can be a fun, theatrical experience that wows guests and lets you feel a bit closer to the process. Or it can be irritating. It depends on your personal preference.
The main issue with this roaster is timing. You’ll need a few tries to really get an idea for how quickly it browns the beans. The design makes checking them mid-roast distinctly difficult, so you’ll generally have to be guided by your intuition and that tell-tale first crack.
Yes, the Hamilton Beach 73400 is a popcorn popper. Also yes, you can use it to roast coffee beans at home. You don't get any temp control or fancy features, but it gets the job done at an eye-popping price point.
Hamilton Beach 73400 Popcorn Popper Features & Specifications
Hamilton Beach 73400 Popcorn Popper Pros
Hamilton Beach 73400 Popcorn Popper Cons
Hamilton Beach 73400 Popcorn Popper Features & Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
Learn More About Choosing The Best Home Coffee Roaster
How To Roast Coffee At Home
So, how do you roast your own coffee? There are 10 simple steps, that will take you from bean to cup.
Step 1: Buy green, unroasted coffee beans
They can be quite hard to find in person, but they’re easily purchasable online from sites like SweetMarias.
Step 2: Roast 3-4 minutes to 240°F
You’ll need a home coffee roaster. If you don’t have one, this guide will help you choose the best home coffee roaster for your needs.
After 3-4 minutes of roasting, you’ll produce pale white beans, ending around the 240°F (140°C). This is a very important stage because it’s here that the bean begins to lose moisture and begin absorbing heat into its center. The smell here is going to be grassy and fresh.
Step 3: Continue roasting to 300°F
Coloring begins and the beans become yellow. It’s here that the Maillard Reaction starts to happen.
This chemical reaction, sometimes referred to as browning, creates new flavors and aromas in food, and occurs in everything from cookies to steaks. The beans will now start to smell more like fresh hay.
Step 4: Continue roasting to 330°F
At this stage the beans orange or very light brown. It’s here that caramelization starts to happen and the aroma turns from something vegetal into something sweet and appetizing!
Step 5: First crack at 385°F
The beans will start to pop! This is called first crack and is a key moment because it marks the beginning of the development stage.
The minutes that follow require the most finesse and knowledge because it’s after first crack that the coffee will change the most.
Steps 6-9 describe how to achieve varying roast levels. You can stop at any time after reaching the desired roast (e.g., light, medium, dark, French, or Italian) and proceed to Step 10.
Step 6: Light-to-medium roast at 400°F
The beans develop and darken to a light brown. Shortly after the first crack, you’ll reach what’s called the city or medium roast.
Many call this the perfect point to enjoy the innate flavors bean, and it tends to favor fruity, acidic notes present in Kenyan and Ethiopian coffee beans.
Step 7: Medium-to-dark roast at 410°F
The beans develop into a medium brown as further caramelization occurs. This is called a full city roast and it’s here that the roast starts to affect the bean with notes of chocolate, caramel, and nuttiness.
A little oil will begin to leak from inside the bean, and the overall acidity of the bean will start to drop.
Step 8: Second crack and dark, oily beans at 445°F
The beans will become dark brown and oily, then undergo second crack. This is exactly what it sounds like: a second, quieter crack of the coffee bean.
It marks the French or dark roast stage, where smokey flavors really start to dominate and the sugars in the bean almost begin to burn.
Developing the beans even further will give you an Italian roast, which is very dark brown and begins to become quite bitter and even charred. Once you reach an Italian roast, it’s time to stop.
Step 9: Overroasting after the second crack
You won’t get much time after Italian roast before the beans begin to overroast and become extremely dark brown, almost black, and oily.
At this point, smoke and acrid flavors will overpower everything else and you’ll have ruined the batch.
Step 10: Whenever you choose to stop roasting, begin the cooling process
Once you’re satisfied with your roasted beans, immediately place them into a large colander, and then tip them into a second one.
Continue to transfer the beans between the two colanders for 1-2 minutes. This allows them to cool much more rapidly and shakes loose all the outer bean-skin (chaff) that has come loose during the roasting process.
After this, you’ll want to wait 3-4 days for the gases in the beans to disappear.
3 Types of Home Coffee Roasters
There are 3 main types of home coffee roaster:
Manual
Air
Drum
1. Manual coffee roasters
As you might have guessed from the name, manual machines put most of the workload onto you.
The most common variety is the drum, which consists of a simple metal drum over a propane burner. You hand-crank the drum to keep the beans moving and air circulating.
You’ll also see waffle style ceramic roasters, which are essentially enclosed ceramic pans with a textured interior. You place the beans inside, place the roaster over the heat and toss them yourself.
Both options are quite fun and novel but may grow tiresome after repeated use. They also lack any technical assistance. Both control of heat and timing are left entirely up to you.
2. Drum coffee roasters
More sophisticated drum roasters come with a number of extra features to make them a good upgrade to a manual machine.
First and foremost, the drum is powered by the machine, meaning you don’t need to constantly watch and turn the drum yourself.
Drum roasters also benefit from less extreme heating elements, which allow the drum to heat more evenly and gently.
A drum roaster will typically take 12-20 minutes depending on its capacity, which gives considerably more time to play around in the development stage.
3. Air coffee roasters
Air roasters work just like popcorn machines, pushing hot air through a chamber to roast the beans.
In fact, many people choose to use high-powered popcorn machines to roast their beans if they’re on a budget!
Air roasters are less visually appealing but are generally a little easier to use than drum roasters as there are fewer variables to control.
Note about air roasters: We discuss the possibility of using a popcorn machine as a low-cost air roaster several times in this article. Used carefully, it can be a great way to roast your own beans at home on a very tight budget. However, you must take the relevant precautions and be responsible. It will output a decent amount of smoke, and if you don’t supervise the machine it will carry on roasting the beans until they are burnt to charcoal or it starts a fire.
Which home coffee roaster should I pick?
Picking the right roaster can feel overwhelming, but it’s actually surprisingly simple. You just need to ask yourself 4 questions.
How much do you actually want to do this?
Countless cabinets around the world are lined with machines gathering dust. If you’re just curious about the idea, spending upwards of $500 on a machine probably isn’t the best idea. Roasting is a fickle art that requires time, patience, and a strong will to really get into.
If you’re not sure this is something you really want to commit to, choose one of the cheaper options to get a taste for it. A manual drum or a cheap popcorn maker will help you to see how keen you really are. It will also help you see if you’re a fan of either the drum or air roasting style.
What’s your budget?
Precision-controlled drum and air roasters aren’t cheap with upper-range models costing as much as a good home espresso machine like the DeLonghi Magnifica ESAM3300.
If you have the money and enthusiasm, drum roasters are a great bet, but for those with more limited budgets, either a ceramic manual roaster or a popcorn machine may once again be the right choice.
How much time do you want the roast to take?
Air roasters tend to complete their process in 8-10 minutes whereas drum roasters will take up to 20. This can make all the difference if you’re lacking free time, or if you make the fatal mistake of letting your reserves run dry on a weekday morning!
How ergonomic do you want the roaster to be?
Is it something you’d like to be able to take to work or to a friend’s house? Do you have a lot of counter space for it to live on or are you looking for something to tuck away when out of use?
Air roasters tend to be smaller and more portable, so they’ll better suit frequent movement but are often less visually appealing to keep out on a counter.
Best Home Coffee Roaster
The Coffee Maven's Top Pick
Behmor 1600 Plus Drum Roaster
Critically-acclaimed and much-loved, the Behmor 1600 Plus drum roaster can roast up to 1 lb of beans at a time. That's the largest capacity among home roasters and is ideal for true coffee enthusiasts.
I'm Bryan but most people know me as The Coffee Maven. I grew up outside Boston, Massachusetts and received my Bachelor's degree in Biochemistry from Providence College. My first introduction to coffee was during my college days, when I used it as a source of caffeine to fuel late-night study sessions, but soon I became obsessed with the chemistry of coffee. How did changes to water temperature or contact time affect its taste? Why do beans from Africa taste fruity while beans from Indonesia taste spicy? I launched The Coffee Maven in February 2017 to explore these questions and help others brew their perfect cup. Welcome to my site, and thanks for reading!
