Beyond getting my first fairly decent espresso machine (a Krups Novo Compact), my first real introduction into how good coffee could be has to be the day I discovered I could home roast with nothing more than green coffee, a hot air popcorn popper, and a metal colander.

I’m not talking a small jump here — I’m talking a quantum leap in discovering just how good coffee could be — and it wasn’t just in the taste improvements. Home roasting gave me for the first time a genuine insight into what goes into coffee.

I have the (long retired) newsgroup alt.coffee to thank for this discovery. I remember reading about roasting at home as far back as 15 years ago in the newsgroup, and by 1997, I decided to take the leap. Probably the hardest part was finding green beans. I knew of exactly one local roaster at the time – a tiny place on West Broadway in Vancouver – where I might obtain green coffee. But their prices were prohibitive, so I wrote Barry Jarrett of alt.coffee fame (who runs Riley’s Coffee and Fudge in Illinois) and he sold me my first ever batch of green (months later, I was one of Tom Owen’s first dozen (or hundred) customers at Sweet Marias, long before he had his own domain name).

I read everything I could find online about roasting at home – and there wasn’t a helluva lot of information out there at that time. I heard about a book, called Home Coffee Roasting by some guy named Ken Davids, but I roasted my first batches before buying the book (highly recommended by the way).

Long story short, I started my amateur career as a home roaster, and all with a $20 investment, not including the coffee costs. It changed my perception of what coffee was, and along with milestones like getting a good grinder, was one of those huge leaps in terms of quality in the cup. By 2000, I was still roasting almost exclusively with a hot air popcorn popper, and I was building up my own “coffee cellar” of amazing coffees from around the world.

For a long time I resisted putting a popcorn popper home roasting how to on CoffeeGeek, for a variety of reasons. Truth is, I’m putting this online as a birthday present for my brother, Michael, who’s celebrating his bday on the day this is published. Long story.