Teaboy thank you, I am only looking to roast small amounts to begin with hopefully to get things right, I tried to order some roasted beans from hasbean the other day and the company is no more unfortunately.
Steve Leighton sold it to a larger company, and disappeared from the coffee scene entirely I believe. It’s been subsumed into Ozone coffee..
As for the subject of greens it’s a tricky one. Hasbean and other roasters were putting a similar mark up on green beans to roasted coffee….essentially you saved almost nothing, or nothing, on buying the green beans and roasting vs buying exactly the same coffee already roasted.
The huge problem is that roasters have a much larger markup on cheaper coffees than they do with expensive ones. It’s simply based on what the market will bear. This means if you buy cheaper beans that are the same as many online roasters sell and discount..home roasting seems massively cheaper. If you buy expensive greens, then the markup by the roasters is much less and thus the savings are less.
Once you deduct the markup on the smaller quantities of expensive green coffee + weight loss (16%), electricity, time , packaging involved, you are not saving as much as you think. Plus their larger roasters are usually going to to a much better job than the much smaller home roasters. Added to the fact that the more specialist online roasters take a great deal more care with the very expensive coffee. After all for even the large sacks 60Kg+ at wholesale market price, it can still work out at 12-14 per Kg with transportation.
P.S. The larger the batch size the better and more evenly the coffee roasts (after 5kg it doesn’t matter as much) and above 30kg it can actually go down due to a lack of ability to properly control the roast and other strategies used on very large 100+ kg roasters.
