After listening to the recent episode about Home Offices, which I loved, I was all prepared to show off my work office but I thought this would be more fun and a little more unusual.
I’m a college educator by day, but a coffee roaster by night. I run a small “micro-roasting” business as a side hobby and sell the freshly roasted beans at one of our local farmer’s markets. You can see more here: https://www.instagram.com/fireweedcoffeeco/
I love MPU because it not only helps me with my “front hustle” but I get a lot out of the tips, tricks, and workflows that help me keep up a small side business.
Anyways, here’s my coffee roasting “office.”
This is my roasting rig.
I have Seville Classics UltraDurable Commercial-Grade 3-Tier NSF Utility Cart from Amazon.
A bunch of these silver pots from discarded “Stovepop Stainless Steel Poppers” which are what I initially started my little business on until I could afford an actual coffee roaster (pictured behind the Mac)! I use thse to fill with coffee once it’s roasted, or in the case of the picture, prop my MBP on.
The MBP is the 2017 13-inch with 16GB of Ram and 2.3GHz with all the keyboard troubles to go with it. 
To the left is my cooling rig.
When roasting coffee you need to cool it really fast so I rigged up this 5-gallon bucket with a colander and hooked it up to a Porter Cable Shop-Vac. When the coffee comes out at 430 degrees or so, I drop it into the colander and hit the on-switch. You can imagine how noisy my house is when I’m roasting!
Next is my awesome roaster: The Bullet R1 from Aillio.
These are made in small batches in Taiwan and mine was ordered three months in advance. I can roast about 2 pounds in it at a time and it has both manual controls and controls through the company’s software called RoasTime, which works on MacOS. The software is regularly improving and now has the feature to create roast recipes, which are essentially automated roast settings. As you can see, the roaster has its own cooling bin but it’s not powerful enough for the size roasts I do (1000grams +), thus my other rig. One other important piece is the exhaust fan just above the roaster. A couple of years ago we redid our whole kitchen and because I’ve been home roasting for almost ten years, I had an actual exhaust fan installed that went to the outdoors. This makes a huge difference in eliminating the smoke from the roasting process, and it also explains the strategic placement of the roaster!
A couple of app notes:
You’ll notice a few stickers and an NFC tag that I have for Launch Center Pro. The idea is to use that as a way to log in to togl and start time tracking my roasting. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get it to work and I think it has to do with the tag being on the metal body of the roaster.
I use numbers, drafts, and soulver (for doing math on batches) for tracking my batches, my customers, and more.
A couple of other things:
On the cart, I keep my little box of stamps, markers, and stickies. I use the stamps for stamping the logo on the bags and tons of these little tiny 3M sticky-notes for labeling what bean is what.
Finally, the other part of my office is the staging area. I keep the three or four 10 pound bags of green bean coffee I’m roasting off to the right of the roaster with my Acaia Pearl Bluetooth Scale, a stainless steel bowl I put the coffee in, and the funnel that goes into the Bullet R1.
When I’m all done I packed everything back onto the cart and wheel it away until next time.
Thanks for indulging me. Let me know if you have any questions and you can find out more about Fireweed Coffee and even order some for yourself here:
https://fireweedcoffeeco.com
-Wess
The biggest difference is freshness. You should drink coffee within the first two weeks of it being roasted for the best and freshest taste. It basically has the shelf-life of bread. After that you’re drinking stale coffee or coffee about to become stale. We’ve just gotten used to that as the normal coffee taste.
