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Almost all "quality" coffee is done at a light roast, as the more you roast a coffee the less of the actual coffee you're tasting. Anything you get from Blue Bo

Almost all "quality" coffee is done at a light roast, as the more you roast a coffee the less of the actual coffee you're tasting. Anything you get from Blue Bottle, Stumptown, Intelligentsia, etc. is going to be a light roast.

vladgur 13y ago
I generally pick coffee beans by smell and i get them at whole foods, oftentimes within a day or two of the roast date. Ive tried sightglass, ritual, four barrel and blue bottle(not available at whole foods, but some other places in the bay area). Pretty much none of them are ever labeled dark, medium or light roasted and instead they come up with these imaginative flavor descriptions which I never appreciated in wines and I definitely dont appreciate in coffee. Based on my fairly good sense of smell, ive learned to distinguish medium roasts from dark and light onces because dark ones are generally too burnt and bitter for my taste while light ones are too acidic. All of these coffee brands do have dark roasts(yes even Blue Bottle -- do you think Three Africans is light?) and medium roasts and plenty of light roasts. Its just tough to find any that are labeled as such
- reillyse 13y ago
  I don't want to start a war but I think labeling coffee by the roast level is far too simplistic for most people. The roast level as you've described really just tells us what the bean looks like, i.e light medium & dark. I'm a huge proponent of lighter roasts, but not for the color. More because higher roast levels get in the way of the beautiful flavor inherent in good coffee (the corollary of this is that it's easy to hide bad coffee in over roasting - hello Starbucks) The flavor profiles aren't "imaginative descriptions". Yes they are very subjective, but that doesn't mean they do not exist, just that our senses aren't good at detecting & describing them. To give an example, I run an online coffee company and over the last few months we've shipped coffees that genuinely smell everything from a Papua New Guinea that smelled incredibly like chocolate & nuts through to a Yirg that smelled uncannily like strawberries & cream. Honestly I thought the last one was BS until I smelled it. I wouldn't consider that I have an amazing sense of smell but I can tell the difference between three or four unshipped types of coffee that we have in our packing space by smelling the degassing valve. tl;dr There are so many differences between coffee beans for a description of the roast level to adequately describe them
  - vladgur 13y ago
    There was a freakonomics episode called 'Do more expensive wines taste better' which essentially presented wine experts with a a blind test of different wines and they were not able to tell which ones were cheaper and which ones were pricier based on the 'flavor profiles' that they detected. While it doesnt mean that there are no flavor profiles on roasted coffee beans, what it means is detection of the flavor profile is probably very subjective. In my experience flavor profiles are rarely guaranteed between roasts, one thing i could always tell if this particular roast is acidic or too dark. This is just my perception. I usually make my coffee using a Capresso Burr grinder and aeropress. You can usually find me at whole foods sniffing the timestamped paper bags of coffee until i settle on something that doesnt smell too burnt or too acidic.

vladgur 13y ago

I generally pick coffee beans by smell and i get them at whole foods, oftentimes within a day or two of the roast date. Ive tried sightglass, ritual, four barrel and blue bottle(not available at whole foods, but some other places in the bay area). Pretty much none of them are ever labeled dark, medium or light roasted and instead they come up with these imaginative flavor descriptions which I never appreciated in wines and I definitely dont appreciate in coffee. Based on my fairly good sense of smell, ive learned to distinguish medium roasts from dark and light onces because dark ones are generally too burnt and bitter for my taste while light ones are too acidic. All of these coffee brands do have dark roasts(yes even Blue Bottle -- do you think Three Africans is light?) and medium roasts and plenty of light roasts. Its just tough to find any that are labeled as such

reillyse 13y ago
I don't want to start a war but I think labeling coffee by the roast level is far too simplistic for most people. The roast level as you've described really just tells us what the bean looks like, i.e light medium & dark. I'm a huge proponent of lighter roasts, but not for the color. More because higher roast levels get in the way of the beautiful flavor inherent in good coffee (the corollary of this is that it's easy to hide bad coffee in over roasting - hello Starbucks) The flavor profiles aren't "imaginative descriptions". Yes they are very subjective, but that doesn't mean they do not exist, just that our senses aren't good at detecting & describing them. To give an example, I run an online coffee company and over the last few months we've shipped coffees that genuinely smell everything from a Papua New Guinea that smelled incredibly like chocolate & nuts through to a Yirg that smelled uncannily like strawberries & cream. Honestly I thought the last one was BS until I smelled it. I wouldn't consider that I have an amazing sense of smell but I can tell the difference between three or four unshipped types of coffee that we have in our packing space by smelling the degassing valve. tl;dr There are so many differences between coffee beans for a description of the roast level to adequately describe them
- vladgur 13y ago
  There was a freakonomics episode called 'Do more expensive wines taste better' which essentially presented wine experts with a a blind test of different wines and they were not able to tell which ones were cheaper and which ones were pricier based on the 'flavor profiles' that they detected. While it doesnt mean that there are no flavor profiles on roasted coffee beans, what it means is detection of the flavor profile is probably very subjective. In my experience flavor profiles are rarely guaranteed between roasts, one thing i could always tell if this particular roast is acidic or too dark. This is just my perception. I usually make my coffee using a Capresso Burr grinder and aeropress. You can usually find me at whole foods sniffing the timestamped paper bags of coffee until i settle on something that doesnt smell too burnt or too acidic.