Not your average joes

ARLINGTON, Va. – America’s most finicky coffee drinkers tout their caffeine connoisseurship in many, often contradictory, ways. They spend a bundle at Starbucks or refuse to patronize big chains. They only drink espresso or decline any cup of joe they didn’t brew themselves.

Then there are people like Chris Becker of Arlington, whose coffee worship involves a ritual that places him at the outer edge of the country’s java culture.

Becker roasts coffee beans at home.

“Even my less-than-good batches are fresher than any (beans) I’d buy in a store,” said Becker, a 30-year-old government employee who uses a gas grill to transform flavorless green coffee beans into savory dark-brown kernels that he then grinds and brews within a few days, if not hours.

It doesn’t require a lot of time, money or equipment to roast coffee beans at home – less than 10 minutes in an air popcorn popper does the trick – but enthusiasts devote plenty of each to the craft.

Home roasters congregate at Web sites such as coffeegeek.com, where they exchange techniques; they get together in person to sample, or “cup,” one another’s beans; and many maintain log books, where they record details such as the amount of time and heat applied to each batch they roast.

“Some guys are over the top,” said Dave Borton of Monroe, Wis., who has been roasting at home since January, belongs to an Internet-based bean buyers club and gives away about two pounds of freshly roasted beans every week to co-workers and members of his church. “My wife would tell you I am over the top.”

To cater to this tiny-but-growing market, a cottage industry that exists mostly online has blossomed over the past decade, selling countertop electric roasters that cost anywhere from $75 to $500 and green coffee beans from the world’s best growing regions priced at around $5 a pound. These items can also be found at some brick-and-mortar specialty shops, such as Fante’s Kitchen Wares Shop of Philadelphia and Zaccardi’s of Scarsdale, N.Y.

Perhaps the most popular purveyor of green coffee beans is Oakland, Calif.-based sweetmarias.com, which sells around 400,000 pounds a year, according to Maria Troy, who has run the business for nine years with her husband, Thompson Owen, the founder and something of a folk hero in the home-roasting community.

Sweet Maria’s offers customers more than 60 varieties from Central America, Africa and Asia. Prices range from $4.45 to $29.90 a pound.

Dennis Robbins of Kernersville, N.C., meanwhile, launched thecaptainscoffee.com in 2003 and now sells about 18,000 pounds a year. Robbins first learned about home roasting a few years earlier while listening to a radio program about coffee.

“Some guy calls in and says he roasts his own … in an old popcorn popper,” recalled Robbins, who at the time was getting regular deliveries of Starbucks coffee for about $15 a pound. After a quick search on the Internet, Robbins found green beans that could be purchased for about a third of that price, and pretty soon he was hooked.

“It was like the difference between a tomato bought in the supermarket and one grown in your garden,” he said.