Talk:Home roasting coffee
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[edit] Deleted Sweet Marias link
I love the store as much as anyone, but it doesn't have any particular reason to be "advertised" over other stores, especially when other good (and non-sales-oriented, non-commercial) sites are available for reference in the same section.--MattShepherd 13:01, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
- Yeah I've been mixed on that one. It does have an incredible collection of info on home roasting which it's a shame not to reference in some manner. Garglebutt / (talk) 22:13, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
- the thing is, Sweet Marias (along with Coffee Bean Corral) are really the forefathers of the movement to sell green online to home roasters - many people cut their teeth on home roasting just by reading the stuff on Tom's site. If it's removed as a link, maybe it's a good idea to add it to the body as a reference point as being the grandfather of home roasting commerce sites. Coffeegeek / (talk) 00:11, 12 April 2006 (PDT)
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- someone added it back and I removed it again. Maybe it can be referenced in the article if someone wants to write a section on the history of home roasting, but even then I am not sure it belongs. Master shepherd 22:43, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
I deleted Sweet Marias again along with 3 other bean sellers. Master shepherd 01:51, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Deleted Links
It seems that all external links were deleted on Aug. 7, without comment. I don't know about Wikipedia's policies, but at least some of those looked useful and non-commercial, e.g. Coffee Geek. I think it would be appropirate to put (at least some of) them back. 130.153.173.15 06:14, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Is this entry neutral in POV ?
I love homeroasting as much as the next person, but this page does not display the sort of neutral POV that we should expect on wikipedia. Some of the claims are quite exaggerated; does home roasting really give you access to more varieties ? I doubt it. Some of the other statements seem to hype homeroasting and denigrate corrercial roasting in an unsubstantiated way. UNSUBSTANTIATED statements that commercial coffees are lower in quality for economic reasons sound a lot like political-economic rhetoric to me.
- Being actively involved in the home roasting scene I don't quite see the issues you refer to.
- Home roasting gives you access to more varieties and customised blends. This may vary by supplier but is certainly the case in Australia and the US.
sa: Nonsense - you can obtain every single one of these varieties in roasted form, often from the same vendor, but also from small roast shops. Obviously unless homeroasters are able to secure exclusive access to some type of bean, then clearly this variety is also available in roast form from some commercial source.
- Commercial roasters consume large volumes of general bean stocks while the boutique roasters snaffle the special beans. The former are much cheaper than the latter.
sa: Yes, this is correct, but it doesn't address any point above. If the issue is "economics", then the actual cost outlay, including roasting equipment and especially labor-time makes the economics of HR negative. No you cannot save any money homeroasting if your time is worth even minimum wage. Homeroasting is not an economic benefit, the same can be said of most hobbies activities. Freshness and the control of the roast is an HR advantage, economics is not.
- Commercial roasting counts the life of a roasted bean in weeks or even months compared to days for home roasting.
sa: Really ? Where is that written in stone ? Do you have a phone number so I can talk to this "Commercial roasting" source ? This is another example of exaggeration and unsubstantiated claims being attributed to an inaccessible source. "Corrercial roasting" is not a source you can cite. PLEASE read the wikipedia articles of form before re-introducing these errors.
Garglebutt / (talk) 23:14, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Needs serious revision
This article is of very poor quality.
Is it true that home roasting must be accomplished in "your home" ? So if roast in the the backyard, in shop at work, in the lab at school, at a neighbor's home or over a campfire it's not home roasting ? That's silly. The very first sentence is overly exclusive and virtually every sentence which follows is either substantially in error or misguided.
The second sentence lists an incomplete, unreferences and pointless list of roasting heat sources. This belongs in a description of methods, NOT in the intro.
There are excessive wiki reference links, often to inapproriate reference pages. For example roast coffee does not "outgass" in the sense of the reference page. Roast coffee develops and releases CO2, but NOT by outgassing as defined here. Similarly the reference to "vacuum" is only tangentially releated to "vacuum packaging", and not significantly relevant to this article.
The section on Freshness makes an implicit assumption that outgassing is directly related to freshness, while in fact the term outgassing is not relevant, and the relationship between the CO2 evolved and the "freshness" is indirect and misses the point. This section also skips between freshness of roast and green beans with no motivation.
Many statements in this article are completely unsupported and quite a few could never be substantiated; that is they are purely the personal opinion of the author.
The analogy to wine is hackneyed and an exaggeration and ignores the many obvoius differences.
"Large commercial roasters are typically far more interested in [...]" Is purely a biased personal opinion. I happen agree with that opinion, but it has no place in a Wikipedia article.
"Home roasters easily trade off the cost against the improvement in quality of the beans", is also pure opinion.
"Home roasting is how all coffee roasting started with manual agitation of beans over an open flame", is ungrammatical hooey. This issue really belongs in another article on coffee roasting history. Some of the earliest methods, heated sand, tin box pans, and the Turkish roasters do not use open flames.
"As recently as 50 years ago it was common place for a family to roast beans for their own consumption", is clearly not true for the US. Such statements need qualification or references.
I could go on, but this article demands serious revision. Please review the Wikipedia style and guideline pages before revising !
"As recently as 50 years ago it was common place for a family to roast beans for their own consumption", is clearly not true for the US. Such statements need qualification or references.
I don't see how it "is clearly not true for the US".
SA: I *believe* that the major shift from small roasters to large commercial roasters occurred about the time that the Jabez Burns roaster (one of the early large scale roasters) was invented circa 1864. I can accept that small scale roasting persisted for decades afterward, but certainly NOT until 1956 (50yo). This is unsupportable based on my experience (I'm 54yo) and conversations with others. In any case the statement is highly dubious and has no supporting reference. My hunch is that homeroasting hasn't been "commonplace" in the US for nearly a century.
Whilst not denying the statement in question would be better with a qualification or reference, your comment itself, taken at face value, is personal opinion. What point are you trying to make regarding the US? If it's not done there it doesn't count? You seem to have a knowledge of coffee roasting. I thought wikipedia was designed so that revision could easily be made. Why aren't you making your suggested improvements? Thundergod
SA: I did make several major improvements and these were promptly deleted, apparently by the original author avidly protecting his writing.
[edit] What does this mean ?
"With the ongoing desire to reduce manual effort in the home, commercial suppliers now dominate the roasted coffee market and sales of freeze dried coffee far outweighs fresh bean consumption".
Can anyone explain what this sentence intends to convey ?
Commerial suppliers dominate every market. That's a tautology. If the product is in the market it is, by definition, commerial and therefore from a commercial supplier. Is this just jibberish ?
The statement that freeze dried sales "far outweighs" fresh bean consumption requires some reference and some definition of "fresh bean". I read that in the US during the height of freeze dried coffee popularity in the 1970s, that about one third of coffee consumed was freeze dried, while today it's about 15%. I have no data for other markets, but I doubt that freeze dried ever "far outweighed" roast bean consumption.
More to the point - what does this have to do with home roasting ?
-- SA: Regarding, "Can anyone explain what this sentence intends to convey ?". The statement is like many others in this shambles of a page - it means nothing, has no motivation aside from the authors personal musings. Look at the paragraph on freshness and explain how "outgassing" is connected .... disconnected and disjoint. Look at the topic of heating methods - very incomplete and randomly selected "top of the head" list, which does not enlighten the reader in any way. Examine the equipment section, it sooms to contain some idiosyncratic refernces that are meaningful only to the author. Ugh !
SA: Numerous technical statements on the page contain errors,
SA: FWIW US sales of freeze dried and other soluble coffee products has dropped from a peak around 30% of all coffee in 1974, to a rate of about 6% over the past decade. World sales of soluble (freeze dried & spray dried) coffee was 9.1% and declining in 1998. Soluble coffee appears to most popular in Australia, S.Africa - according to Nestle's website (worlds larget producer of instant), which may explain the misperceptions of some contributors.
