The other day I was contacted by Suyog Mody, co-founder of Brooklyn-based Driftaway Coffee, welcoming me to the world of home-roasting. As it turns out, he also started his home-roasting adventure on a popcorn popper before moving onto bigger and better roasters; a popcorn popper is great for starting out and for personal roasting, but wouldn’t be suitable for roasting at a distribution scale.

I did some digging, and found that Driftaway’s offerings were pretty cool: after determining each customer’s taste preferences, Driftaway roasts and ships fresh bags of coffee to your door every two weeks. For a suburb-dweller such as myself this is huge, as one of the main reasons I got into home roasting was to avoid making weekly trips downtown to buy fresh coffee (believe it or not, big-chain grocery stores don’t always have the freshest coffees). The beans will change over time, but Driftaway tracks the types of tasting notes that each customer likes (their “Coffee Profile”) and sends small-batch, hand-roasted coffee fortnightly to match.

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