The moment passed unnoticed, and I’m not sure exactly when it happened … but sometime near the start of this year this website received its one millionth visitor.

I only noticed this milestone when transferring website statistics into a spreadsheet, something I do only occasionally. Accurate numbers are missing for parts of this site’s ten year history, but the steadiness of visitor numbers means I can be fairly confident that the one million total was reached within a month or two either side of the start of 2009. Not hits, or page views, but unique visitors - actual humans visiting this site (repeat visits within each month are filtered out).

My mind boggles a little - this is just a non-commercial, hobby-related personal website which I’ve hardly ever promoted. I can credit the visitor traffic mostly to the page about my navel lint collection, which has been referred to by numerous other websites and media stories over the years. In fact, as of today, there are 2786 websites linking to my navel lint page, according to Google - a testament to the popularity of things considered weird. What encourages me more is knowing there are another 2100 websites out there linking to pages on my site other than the navel lint page.

If only earning the first million dollars was as easy as accumulating the first million website visitors … if it were so, I might have been reporting this via satellite from an Antarctic cruise ship!

Thank you for visiting.

In 2007 I blogged here about how I’d begun roasting my own coffee beans using a popcorn popper, and shortly after I reported on an improved method using a heat gun and bowl. Things have progressed a little, so I thought I’d do an update on the steps forwards, and backwards, and the lessons.

Ready to roast using my current
setup: raw beans in the bowl

The setup was simple - a heat gun, mounted on a tripod, blowing super hot air (600°C) into a stainless steel bowl, with the beans being stirred by hand with a wooden spoon. Heating is adjusted by moving the heat gun towards or away from the beans (hence the tripod). It produced some great tasting beans, but with some drawbacks. One was the stirring by hand, which can feel a little tedious when done for 15 minutes at a time. Another was the way the bean temperature fluctuated in windy weather - the wideness and shallowness of the bowl left the beans susceptible to the cooling effect of wind gusts.

No problem, I thought. I built a motorised stirrer, and switched to a tall and narrow tin to shelter the beans more. Unfortunately it didn’t work. The tin shape might have reduced the influence of wind a little, but I couldn’t get the stirring to work properly. I experimented with different stirring speeds and paddle designs, but couldn’t get the motorised stirrer to mix the beans thoroughly enough. The result was unevenly roasted beans - some underdone, some almost charcoal, and few in between. Not nice!

So I went back to the wide open bowl and the wooden spoon, and came to appreciate just how well it worked. Stirring for 15 minutes once per week isn’t that hard really, and does allow for very thorough mixing. As for temperature fluctuations, I just took more care to avoid roasting in the wind.

I also tried being more scientific about temperature control. Instead of just observing the bean temperature readout, I set up a laptop and entered the numbers into a spreadsheet while roasting to produce a live chart of the temperature profile, which I could try to match with that of previous good roasts. This proved distracting, and more trouble than it was worth, so I went back to calculating the desired heating rates in my head.

After the roast: beans cooling

One worthy improvement was the use of a fan (see photos). While roasting, the fan provides cool air for the heat gun intake, which prolongs the life of the element. It also blows away the chaff which the beans eject when they crack open. After roasting, the fan is laid on its back so that it blows upwards: this rapidly cools the beans when they are spread over a mesh screen above the fan.

It seems somehow ironic that, after trying to improve the roasting process with technology and a motor, returning to the low-tech simplicity of the heat gun, bowl and spoon has worked better. Apart from a basic temperature display (I need some measure of how fast it is rising), I roast coffee by sight, sound and smell, and the results keep getting better as I get to know each bean type’s characteristics. Equipment and gadgetry are appropriate for big commercial roasters, but human senses and experience are sometimes all the home hobbyist really needs.