From a Popcorn Pot to a Behmor: How My Roasting Journey Began

Long before there was a roastery, a brand, or even a real plan, there was a stainless steel pot on my stove and a bag of green coffee beans I’d ordered on a whim. I’d been drinking mediocre coffee for years, complaining about it the way people do, until one day I decided complaining wasn’t going to fix anything. If I wanted better coffee, I was going to have to figure out how to make it myself.

My first “roaster” was an old popcorn popper pot, the kind with a hand crank built into the lid. I set it on the stovetop, dumped in a handful of green beans, and started cranking. For the first few batches, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I roasted by sound and smell, listening for the crack that meant the beans were changing, watching the color shift from green to yellow to brown, and hoping I’d pull them off the heat before they turned to charcoal.

I burned a lot of coffee that year. My smoke alarm and I got to know each other very well, and my kitchen windows stayed open no matter the weather. But somewhere in all that trial and error, I started to understand what was actually happening inside that pot, and how small changes in heat and timing could completely change what ended up in the cup. That popcorn pot taught me more about roasting than any book could have.

Eventually the stovetop couldn’t keep up with how much I wanted to roast, or how much I wanted to learn. Batches were small and inconsistent, and it was starting to feel like a bottleneck rather than a workshop. That’s when I made the leap to a Behmor drum roaster, and it felt like trading in a bicycle for a car. Suddenly I had real control over temperature and time, the ability to roast larger batches, and a lot more consistency from one roast to the next.

The Behmor didn’t replace what I’d learned on the stove, it built on it. Every roast profile I dial in now still comes back to those first instincts I developed listening for cracks over a popcorn pot. The tools got better, but the ear for coffee came from doing it the hard way first.

I still think about that popcorn pot a lot. It’s a reminder that this whole thing started from curiosity and a willingness to mess up in the process of getting better, not from expensive equipment or shortcuts. That small batch, hands on approach is still baked into how I roast today, even with better gear. If you’re drinking a bag of this coffee right now, you’re tasting the result of a lot of burnt batches and a lot of stubborn persistence, and honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.