When we first started roasting coffee about 25 years ago, specialty coffee drinkers expected a very dark roast. This was the trend set by Starbucks.
We bucked that trend, instead searching for the best roast possible from each of the coffees we purchased. We were learning, and had little experience, but we dared to taste what was in our mouths. And we found that when roasted super dark, all coffee tasted… well… burnt. Because it was burnt. Duh?
Now we are finding the opposite bias among specialty coffee drinkers and small batch roasters. The roasting trend is light now. And now, most of the coffee doesn’t taste burnt… now we find most of it tastes sour.
This graph show 2 time/temperature curves (time horizontal, temperature vertical) They trace the roasts of the same coffee roasted to the same end temperature. The blue one turned out delicious, the red one is hollow and empty.
Here’s my gripe: It doesn’t matter what a coffee looks like… what matters is how it tastes.
Roasting is an art and a science. The chemical reactions going on during roasting are complex — beyond anyone’s ability to understand in detail — and they depend on a lot more than the colour of the roasted coffee.
We love geeking out on the science of coffee roasting! Over the years we have developed our own tools to not only see what a roast has done, but to control the roast using roasting profiles that we have developed by trial and error. We have learned how to roast each of our coffees to its best effect. We even have some coffees that we roast in 2 ways yielding very different coffees. And sometimes we even blend the 2 roasts of the same coffee together!
But I digress. The point is that coffee is not solely, nor even predominantly, defined by the end temperature of the roast, whether it is dark or light.
When a light roasts out there is expertly profiled I don’t gripe… It might lop off half the flavour spectrum available in the bean… but if it tastes good, then that’s great!
So where do we stand on this? We stand with what we taste in our mouths! We have little interest in what it looks like! We don’t like burnt and we don’t like sour. We love to discover the chocolate, caramel, nutty, fruity, spicy, earthy and exotic flavours that are revealed in well roasted, coffee.
Discovering the nuances of a beautiful single origin coffee are similar to those in an estate wine. That the subtlety does not translate well to broad criteria like roast colour. We enjoy going deeper.