To Roast Coffee

Instructions

1. Buy the best kind of coffee in a raw state. Keep it for two or three years if you are not certain it has been so long harvested - new coffee is greatly inferior to that which has been kept - and roast it at home.
2. Half fill the cylinder of the roaster. It should be only half filled.
3. Turn it rather slowly over the fire, which should never be fierce, until a strong aromatic smell is emitted.
4. Then quicken the movement: the grain is by that point quite heated, and it will become too highly coloured before it is roasted through if it is slowly finished.
5. Judge the colour by eye. Until some little experience has been acquired, slide back the door of the cylinder and look at the coffee occasionally towards the end of the process. It is done when it is of a fine, light, equal brown.
6. Spread it quickly upon a large dish and throw a thickly folded cloth over it.
7. Let it remain thus until it is quite cold.
8. Put it immediately into canisters or bottles and exclude the air carefully from it.
9. Acton's note on the equipment: this can be cheaply done in small quantities by means of an inexpensive roasting apparatus, the cost not exceeding seven or eight shillings, with a very trifling supply of charcoal needed; or with a larger one at about double the price.