Roasting Coffee at Home with a Popcorn Popper

Next week, we'll tell you how to track down the best roasted beans in your area. But if your college is out in the boonies, like many are, there's probably no locally-roasted coffee at all. In that case, you might want to treat yourself to some dorm-roasted coffee.

It's actually not that complicated. All you need is a popcorn-popper. Trying some truly fresh-roasted coffee will make it worth buying one of these $20 residence-hall-friendly devices. Finding the green (green coffee beans, that is) can be hard/expensive -- but you have the flexibility of being able to ship them in, which wouldn't work as well for roasted coffee since it goes stale quickly.

You can also get a lot more detail from CoffeeGeek, which initially turned me on to this concept:

Roasting Coffee with a Popcorn Popper