Over the last week, I have been reading articles about dark roast coffee. I think a good many of us were brought up with a French Roast coffee, and were told that was a good coffee. I mean come on, it's French, so why wouldn't it be good. Right? Well....
Dark roast, as I have been reading, hides a multitude of sins in some cases. You may have poorer quality beans. You may have some older beans. In some cases, you may have just roasted the coffee too much.
When you look at a dark roast, you will see the beans are shiny. This is the oils in the coffee coming out. If the beans are too shiny, that is a coffee which has been over roasted. My parents used to get beans like this all the time. For a long time I thought the pretty shiny beans were what you wanted. Not so.
Roasters today are playing with lighter and more medium roasts. Those seem to be the roasts which extract the most flavor out of a coffee. As always roasting is an art and science. You want a balance of sorts, but you want to play around to see if you can create something amazing.
My feeling is if the roast is too light, you have a blander coffee, of course this is going to be dependent on the type of coffee you are roasting. In an era of "blondes, mediums, and bolds," you want to have a coffee which is going to be more than palatable. You want it to make you feel good as you drink it.
Now if you like the dark roasts, terrific. I will encourage the dark roast lovers to expand their horizons, and see what something less roasted will do for you.
Charlie
Yes. For a long time, I chose beans that could take a darker roast, and then roasted them until shiny. Then I started getting beans for which Sweet Maria's recommended a lighter roast, and tried to not go as far into 2nd crack. Seems obvious now, that the darker you go, the more character most coffees lose. But it took me a while to learn that the "dark" taste we had gotten used to was quite often the taste of burnt coffee!
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