I am dying to roast

One of my earliest posts on this blog was one year ago on October 16 and was about my new Ron Kyle coffee roasting drum for roasting coffee in a gas BBQ grill. That early post can be found here. About a week ago I was roasting a couple of pounds of Ethiopia Organic Wet-Process Koratie from Sweetmarias.com. If for some reason you also want to roast this special coffee it is no longer available from Sweetmarias but can be found at my place of work for a few more days so give me a call and come on by for a cup. Good coffees sell out fast. In the first pic I put the Ron Kyle Coffee roasting drum on my SUV windshield not just to show its relative size but also to amplify to any readers who don't know me personally that I really am a living stereotype of a white, male, SUV driving, suburbanite. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I mean other than the sexist, ignorant of my white privilege, environmental damage that I represent.
I love this roaster. It is bomb proof in its construction and can roast any amount of coffee up to 4 pounds at a time while giving total control over the roast profile. The profile usually consists of first crack at 10 minutes and second crack (if I go that far) 4 minutes later with a dump into the cooling fan/mesh colander cooling system to stop it at a full city roast. The second pic is to show the agitating blades inside and the third pic is to show what happens if you try to hug a product you love when it is somewhere between 500 and 800 degrees. My temp taker says 800 but I know the coffee roasts to under 500 degrees. So who knows how hot the metal rotisserie is that holds the drum.
Sadly Ron Kyle the inventor and creator of my drum roaster recently died. He was a great home roast innovator who found out he had cancer three weeks before dieing on August 13 of this year. I wanted to post a pic of him but his site and any pics on the web seem to have been deleted. (update... John found that a friend of Rons put the site back up today. Here is a link.) It is strange how reading hundreds of Sweetmarias homeroast list emails from him and having participated in about 15 personal emails with Ron made me care about and feel like I knew him like many of my other friends. I miss him like anyone else I care about. Thank you Ron for all the great coffee I will roast in your drum. Jared