Dragon's Lair Coffee and the Process of Roasting

It is a well known fact on the island that more "Kona" coffee is sold than is grown. Dragon's Lair produces and roasts really good and honest coffee, and it is priced $5-10 cheaper than big distributors and what you can find online.

We roast to order so it is super fresh, and it means we get to roast and package instead of weed-whacking or sawing up trees! So, if you want to try some of our coffee, please do! We are here for another 10 days.

Order Dragon's Lair 100% Kona Coffee

Roasting is really fun! First, we heat up the tall, skinny roaster to about 300 degrees and turn the blower on. We pour around 9 lbs of green coffee in, and the blower keeps it moving and looking like a fountain of coffee. As the coffee heats up, it becomes lighter so we have to keep lowering the blower so it doesn't push the coffee over the sides.

The coffee turns from green to peanut-colored, then starts getting dark. At about 390 degrees, half of each coffee bean starts to pop and sounds just like popcorn! The popping continues for a few minutes and the roaster gets fuller as the beans expand. Then there is silence and the beans continue to heat up. If we are doing a medium roast, we wait for the temperature to reach about 440 degrees and dump the coffee out. But if we are doing a medium-dark roast, we wait until the second round of popping starts at around 450-455 degrees (only one side of the bean pops in the first round, and the other side starts popping in the second round). Once the second round of popping has just begun, we dump the medium-dark roast into the cooler and the popping continues for a few more minutes outside of the roaster.

Dumping the coffee out is a very high-stress process, believe it or not. Once we decide the coffee is done, we have about 3 seconds to save 9 pounds of $27/lbs. coffee from being ruined. All at once, we turn the heater off, turn the blower down, tilt the roaster so all the coffee falls into the cooling box, turn the blower back up, raise the roaster back up, and stir the coffee beans. Then, deep breath!