Previously, I roasted coffee beans with just a bowl, a wooden spoon, and a heat gun mounted on a tripod (I wrote about it here). A heat gun is like an industrial strength hairdryer, blowing out there at 600°C, and it worked very well. It all dismantled and fit into a crate for easy storage indoors, the only disadvantage being the time required to set it up and pack it away.

1. In storage mode

Recently I progressed to using a bread maker to house and stir the beans - much easier, with greater temperature control and more evenly roasted beans.  The only problem was that it didn’t all fit into a crate, and taking all the bits outside and setting up, then later dismantling and storing, took longer than the roasting itself.  Because of the smoke and chaff produced when roasting coffee it needs to be done outside, but I don’t have anywhere outside suitable for storing the gear, so the obvious solution was to build some sort of mobile arrangement. These photos show what I came up with (click on any of them to see larger versions).

The first photo shows my coffee roaster in storage mode, as it is when kept indoors. Built onto a box-moving trolley is a wooden platform holding the bread maker, a heat gun mounted on the centre column of a tripod, and the fold-down cooling platform (the toilet seat). Stored with this are the other necessary bits - cooling tray, power board, extension cable, multi-meter with temperature probe, stopwatch, oven glove, wooden spoon, fold up stool, and a sweat band (it can get hot when roasting).  The only thing not housed on the trolley is the fan: that’s because it gets used elsewhere for other things.

2. Roasting in progress

The second photo is roasting mode, seen here inside my garage. Hot air from the heat gun blows onto the beans being agitated inside the bread maker, with the bean temperature being measured by a probe inserted into the side. Temperature is adjusted by moving the heat gun up and down. The fan reduces the stress on the heat gun element while also blowing away some of the chaff.

The third photo shows cooling mode. Once the beans are done, the fan is laid down on its back, a mesh cooling tray is placed on top of the fan, and the hot beans are poured onto the cooling tray. It only takes a minute for the air blowing upwards through the beans to cool them down completely. After the removal of the beans and a quick bit of unplugging and folding up, the contraption is ready to be wheeled back indoors until next time.

3. Beans being cooled

Why the toilet seat, you may ask? I needed some method of supporting the fan in its laying down position - something to keep it up off the ground to allow good airflow, with plenty of open space in the middle where the fan draws up the air.  A toilet seat performs this function perfectly, without modification. It even came with its own built-in hinge so it could be folded up for storage … and being a guy, leaving the seat up comes naturally to me.

Apart from the bread maker (which I picked up second-hand from a pawn shop), I didn’t need to spend anything on this mobile coffee roaster. I already had the trolley, the bits of wood and other parts, and the toilet seat was been sitting around for at least 10 years waiting for another chance at life. It all supports my belief that nothing potentially useful should be thrown away in case it might be useful one day.

A little bit past the use-by date, maybe?

A few months ago I made a thick vegetable soup, of which an extra bowl was covered and stored in the bottom of the fridge for another time. A few days ago I rediscovered it, covered with mold - but not just any mold. I’m no fungus expert, but there appear to be five different types of mold on the soup, ranging from black, cream and grey to orange and green. The colours and variety of the growths fascinated me, so I couldn’t just get rid of the soup without first photographing it for posterity.

If I was a famous artist, I could probably proclaim this soup mold to be art, and exhibit it in a gallery. As I’m not, I’ll share my fungal art here on my blog (click on it to enlarge).

With computer applications popping up in places like telephones, refrigerators and car GPS units, it might only be a matter of time before computer screens start appearing in toilets (sponsored reading matter, perhaps?). My imagination ran away … what sort of online help would Microsoft offer to toilet users?

The image on the right is one possibility I came up with when I should have been doing something more important like studying. I don’t know where I made it - probably on one of the many image-generator websites around. I just re-discovered it while searching my hard drive for something else, and thought I’d share it. Considering how thoroughly computers are infiltrating our lives, it may not be as far fetched as it looks, which is a scary thought.

Flat out like a lizard drinking
1. Verb/simile. To be working really hard, or so under the pump that you’ve found yourself dehydrated.
2. Adj. Simile. To be extremely busy to the point of running “flat out,” a play on words involving the image of a lizard that physically stretches itself thin to literally drink water from a pond etc.
3. To be, or have been, hard at work. Originating in Australia.

I have indeed been rather busy lately, which is why I haven’t updated this blog (or the rest of this website) for a long time. My readers may know I’ve been studying and working for some time now, which accounts for my flat-out-ness and reduction in spare time.

In April I reduced my studies to half of full time, and with a job also amounting to half of full time, I thought things would be more balanced. Not so! My assignments became more time consuming, which apparently is normal in the end stages of the course I’m studying (but they didn’t tell us that at the beginning). Then I acquired another job doing casual relief work in a number of libraries, with the amount of work so far exceeding my expectations. Between the two jobs I’m now working more than full time, while my home computer sits unemployed and neglected on most days.

It’s a good sort of busyness, though. With all the economic gloom we hear on the news, I feel blessed to have as much work as I can fit in. Also my two jobs are very different and provide balance and variety, while both being close to home and in my field of study.

I do hope to fit in some writing occasionally, because I find it therapeutic … but if I don’t it’s because I’m like a lizard drinking: flat out.

Art of Nonconformity
“Unconventional strategies for life, work and travel”
Chris Guillebeau is an intrepid traveller, and I’ve been following with interest his journey towards the goal of visiting every country in the world by the age of 35. So far, at age 31, he’s been to 107 countries out of 197. He also writes very well on the topic of living an unconventional life, something that resonates with people like me who don’t think being “normal” is all it’s cracked up to be. He doesn’t profess any spiritual beliefs on his website, but his writings line up well with the bible’s teachings on being the unique individual you were created to be, rather than conforming to the pattern of the world.

Get Rich Slowly
“Personal finance that makes cents”
There’s plenty of dodgy stuff on the internet about getting rich quick, but this blog is refreshingly different (just ignore the ads Google places on it). It’s a great resource of personal finance tips and information grounded in good sense and wisdom; the result of extensive research by an average guy named J.D. Roth who got himself out of debt and lives frugally. Some of the content applies to an American audience, but this can be excused as the author is an American.

Backyard Missionary
“Unrefined theological musings, random personal reflections and occasional naughtiness”
This trained pastor, but otherwise regular guy - Andrew Hamilton - writes on subjects ranging from spirituality to books to coffee, and much other stuff. Whatever the topic, he writes from a Christian perspective, but with an authenticity and “down-to-earth-ness” that real people can relate to. Sometimes he raises questions and doubts which I suspect most of us have thought, but never felt comfortable about speaking out. He has just set off with his family on a six month trip round-Australia road trip - the grey nomad lifestyle, but without waiting until he’s old and grey.

Cafe Grendel
“The blog of a coffee snob and home coffee roasting enthusiast”
The subject of this blog is mostly coffee-related, but Grendel (sometimes known as Michael Carroll) writes on a range of other subjects with knowledge, wit and compassion. His Perth Coffee Map is a great resource for anyone looking for a guide to the best coffee outlets in Perth and beyond, all sampled and reviewed personally by Grendel … oh, what sacrifice! He roast his own beans rather well too.

Incidentally, I discovered these four blogs quite independantly of each other, before learning that:

• The writers of the first two blogs both live in Portland, Oregon, and they know each other.
• The writers of the last two blogs both live in Perth’s far northern suburbs, not far from each other, and they know each other. One day I bumped into both of them at a cafe.

Big internet, small world

The fence back in the good old days … before the
fence-mounted brassiere was banned for our protection

The Cardrona Bra Fence was a section of farm fencing in rural New Zealand on which hundreds of womens’ bras had been hung. It began when four women each hung their bra on the fence as a new year celebration for the new millenium. In the succeding six years the bra population multiplied and it grew to be a unique tourist attraction, gaining worldwide attention (and frequent donations of underwear). I visited the quirky collection in August 2006 and blogged about it here, blissfully unaware that just two weeks after my visit the whole lot would be pulled down.

As you may imagine, the sight of hundreds of women’s undergarments hanging artistically from a roadside fence tended to polarise people. While an overwhelming majority viewed it positively, a few saw it as an eyesore, an embarrassment or a traffic hazard, and tried to have it removed. Some claimed it might offend Japanese students in Wanaka, 24km away.

After many unsuccessful legal challenges, and the burning of many bras (on the fence), it was found that the fence rested on public land. The Queenstown Lakes District council then stepped in and ordered the removal of the bras from the fence, declaring them to be an eyesore and traffic hazard. On September 9, 2006, the fence was stripped of over 1500 bras.

I toured the bra fence at its peak, and thought it was rather decorative. At the worst, it was no more unsightly than some of the other man-made structures in the region. Perhaps it could potentially have been a traffic hazard - maybe - but no more so than plenty of other roadside distractions which nobody seemed to be as concerned with. Oh well, at least the vocal minority no longer have to suffer the sight of a fence that didn’t look the same as every other fence.

The battle of the bra fence may have been lost, but I can take comfort in one thing. I was among the last privileged travellers to behold the spectacle of 1500 mammary support garments fluttering majestically in the breeze on a humble farmer’s fence.

• It encourages good spending habits. Earning too much to receive a student allowance, but not earning enough to cover all expenses in the long term, is an excellent incentive to practise careful budgeting.
• It improves appreciation of spare time. This is the principle of supply and demand in action - the less spare time there is, the more highly it is valued.
• It makes life easier for indecisive people by limiting the decisions about how to spend after-hours time. That’s because, whatever the day or time, there is always some sort of homework that ought to be done!
• It helps get chores done. When faced with a pile of unpleasant homework and study, mundane household chores which have been put off for a long time suddenly become more attractive in comparison, and may actually get done as a form of homework avoidance.
• It can encourage a better outlook on employment. Full time work can be a chore, but the endless after-hours homework that comes with studying can inspire appreciation for a job which you can forget about when leaving work for the day.
• It is a double blessing. Many people would like to study, but aren’t able, or would like to work, but can’t find a job … I get to do both! While doing both at the same time can be tiring, many are denied the opportunity to do either.

Now that I’ve avoided homework for however long it took me to write this, I really should get back to revising for an exam on Monday. On the other hand, my toilet needs cleaning …

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.

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.

The healthy dinner consisted of a selection of fresh vegetables … peeled, chopped, bathed in olive oil with a little garlic and ginger, then left in the oven to slowly roast for an hour. Sprinkled with a little salt and dried oregano, this substantial vege feast was not only bursting with goodness but also tasted great and filled me up. The smell was pretty good too. To drink with it, I had a chilled glass of water - filtered tapwater with a bit of lemon juice (from my own tree) which is refreshing and complemented the veges nicely. The cost of this drink was negligible; here is the cost breakdown of the meal:

0.65    sweet potato
0.70    butternut pumpkin
0.55    white gourmet potatoes
0.24    carrot
0.38    pickling onions
0.17    garlic, minced
0.14    ginger, minced
0.45    olive oil (extra virgin)
0.02    salt and dried oregano
—–
$3.30

This is cheap for a main course in Australia - I don’t know of any take-away fast food meal with drink which can be had for less than $3.30, or $4.30 if you add some yoghurt for dessert like I did. I haven’t got the time or inclination to do a thorough price survey, but I’d expect to pay two or three times that much, per person, for a typical burger combo meal, or fish & chips, chinese, take-away chicken, or pizza. Some good frozen or refrigerated dinners from supermarkets can be found for $4 to $6, which is probably the cheapest fast food option, but still not quite as cheap as a healthy dinner made at home.

But what about meat? I often eat fish or chicken, in which case I’d halve the amount of vegetables above and steam them in the microwave. The total cost would vary a lot, depending on what fish or chicken I used (I’ll take note of the costs in future), but would still be less than an equivalent take-away … and healthier!

I should point out that the ingredients I listed above were all top quality, fresh, and locally produced here in Western Australia. You could lower the cost even more by using lesser quality imported vegetables from supermarkets, although they don’t taste as good.

Next time I see someone on TV with a burger and fries, complaining that healthy food costs too much, I’ll feel justified in disagreeing. I suspect the only way that home-made healthy food costs more is if you measure the cost in terms of time, effort, and planning ahead, rather than money.