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This is going to be long and drawn out, but whatever. DEAL WITH IT.

I grew up in the great state of Utah, as a Mormon, and for those of you who don't know, drinking coffee is on the list of things you shouldn't do as a good Mormon. However, my Grandpa, was not Mormon, and drank coffee. Whenever I would visit him, I would smell that good coffee smell. I guess this is where my love of coffee started.

When I was 15, I started working at a candy factory called Kencraft. Often times my shift started at 5:30am, and I just could not hack it. I could not stay awake, and sometimes I would even find a dark corner in the place and take a nap. One day I decided I was going to make use of their crappy Cappuccino dispenser, even though it was against my religion, and this is where I started drinking coffee.

I sound found that I didn't like the mixture of coffee and chocolate, so I would just get the black and add sugar, and I found I that adding sugar and cream was a lot more work, and it didn't taste much better, so I started drinking it black. I'm sure it was some horrible stale robusta blend in the back of that machine, but I didn't care, it kept me awake.

Gradually, I began to like the taste of it, and it's been one of my favorite tastes ever since. From then on, I drank black coffee from anywhere I could find it, and I liked it. It didn't matter how crappy it was, I always found something about a specific cup of coffee that I liked... even the rubbery crap I found at Holiday Oil on the way to a party.

Fast forward, I'm 32 years old, no longer Mormon, and I've been drinking black coffee for 17 years. I had heard about specialty coffee, and about grinding your own beans, but I never really tried it because I already loved coffee, I didn't feel there was much that could be improved upon. Until I started a new job 6 months ago, where my boss is a bonafied coffee snob. She roasts her own, brings it to work where there's a nice burr grinder, and shares it with her team. This is where I find out there really is something to this snob coffee stuff... and after a few months of drinking really good coffee at work, and really bad coffee at home, I bought my own grinder, a Clever Coffee Dripper and a French Press, and a month after that I bought a FreshRoast SR500 which I've been using with some good success.

I decided I wanted a bit of a bigger batch size, because I keep sharing my roasts with everyone. So I bought the Gene Cafe roaster, and that's what brought me here.

Hello Homeroasters!