In Defense of Light Roasting

How many times have you heard something like "I love French Roast coffee". Or, "I like coffee that 'bites back' ". Well, you might as well say "I love some tasteless charcoal drowned in milk and sugar". Sadly, what passes for coffee in many establishments is horribly over-roasted and well past its prime. Also, there seems to be some macho thing going on, with the strongest and darkest possible coffee correlating to testosterone levels or something similar.

As an aside, in a Starbucks last week (I was there for a Green Tea Frappucino - yum - not coffee), I saw a sign advertising their new "Pike Place Blend". They proudly wrote on the blackboard, "Roasted in our York, PA roasting facility on April 10". April 10, my friend. That coffee is more than a month old and is more than likely truly putrid. (Actually, to put my money where my mouth is, I will plan on picking up a cup of Pike Place blend and do a review here in the near future. Should be interesting....)

Anyway, back to my point about dark roasting. Coffee, much like wine, has thousands of aroma/flavor compounds, and a very unique sense of terroir - the essence of the area the coffee is grown in; soil, weather, preparation, etc. However, it takes a lot of skill to bring out those notes without overwhelming them with roast character. For commercial roasters, this is exactly why very dark roasted coffee is the norm. It is easy to gain consistency of product when all you are tasting is carbon. Sure, a venti half-caf vanilla macchiato with soy milk tastes the same from Timbuktu to Tijuana, but it sure doesn't taste anything like good coffee.

On the flip side, very lightly roasted coffee, if not roasted carefully can be as sour as lemons and as nasty as chewing on lawn clippings. Think truck-stop coffee or some of the stuff that is served in work cafeterias. The roaster has to carefully allow the coffee to develop during the roasting process without imparting too much energy such that things go either too quickly or too dark, both of which are bad.

In other words, light roasting coffee takes skill, but you are rewarded with much more complexity in the cup. You can more easily appreciate the tropical fruit notes in an Ethiopian dry-processed coffee, for example, or the soaring acidity of a Kenya. Roast them dark and a lot of those delicate notes are gone, replaced by roast flavors. You'll notice that a lot of the stuff I roast is roasted without ever approaching second crack. It can be a pain to get it right, but when you nail the roast, you truly get something special that links you fundamentally to the area where the coffee was grown.

There are a few commercial roasters out there who get it right. One of the first I tried before getting into homeroasting was the excellent coffee from Din Johnson at Ristretto Roasters. There are others out there as well which can be very good (Intelligentsia, Stumptown, Paradise, etc.), but of course roasting your own provides a different level of satisfaction.

Oh, and one more thing. Roasting for espresso is a different proposition. I think most places still way over-roast their blends for espresso, but in general you need to go a bit darker for use in espresso due to the way the extraction process can blow certain flavor characteristics out of proportion.

So there you have it. Try expanding your horizons and enjoy some lightly roasted coffee. Do me a favor and leave out the milk and sugar as well.