Roast Level
What does it mean? Light? Medium? Dark? Expressive? Nordic? Developed? City? French? Allow me to explain why it (sorta) matters, so you can find the coffee you’ll enjoy the most.
There’s no denying the vast amount of coffee terms floating around in coffee shops and advertisements these days. I’m going to keep this as brief as I can so you can get on your merry way and drink coffee that you’ll like. This is Doin’ Coffee’s take on roast level.
The problem is that there is not an objective way to say exactly how roasted any given coffee really is (though there are a few decent tools and indicators). The landscape of how roasted a coffee is seems to be quite subjective and honestly a bit confusing. In addition to that problem, different coffee cultures or companies may have different terms for very similar levels of roast. I’m going to lay out what roast level really means for what you’ll taste in your cup, and give you a bit of a dictionary so you know what it means when someone offers you a coffee roasted in a particular style.
To put it as simply as possible for those that may not know what roast level they enjoy…”Lighter” means you’ll taste more acidic flavors (think fruit! and at the extreme, think sour!) “Darker” means you’ll be tasting less unique characteristics of a particular coffee, as dark roasts tend to taste more uniform and, well…roasted. (think of more bitter flavors such as dark chocolate, burnt sugars, and at the extreme, a bit smoky and charred!) Every coffee falls somewhere on that spectrum, and all the vocabulary and slang is just a fancy way of trying to tell you where. The science shows that the #1 predictor of how much you’ll like a coffee is the color of the bean, so it pays to know what words translate to the color or roast level that you enjoy most. There are also plenty of arguments about other differences between roast levels, such as caffeine content, shelf life, amount of rest needed before brewing, etc. I’m not going to get into that here, and I’m not here to judge what you like most, (there’s room to love all kinds of coffee) but Doin’ Coffee generally leans on the lighter side most of the time.
Other terms you might run into and where they fit…
Nordic = Very Light, roasted about as little as possible to still be brewable
French = Quite dark (Vienna = Slightly lighter french roast)
Italian = Basically used motor oil. So dark. Nearly beyond dark.
Cinnamon = Quite light
Ultra Light = Light…but ultra
Medium = Can look VASTLY different from roaster to roaster, but typically has a pretty balanced flavor
City = A fairly lightish medium (City+ is just beyond that)
Full City = On the darker side of medium (Full City+ is just beyond that)
If only we had an objective numbering system to fully standardize how roasted a coffee bean really is…Agtron is trying. The idea is to grind a coffee, fill this machine with it, and it will assign a number based on how visually dark the ground coffee is. Even so, it still has it’s own biases and inconsistencies based on how finely ground the coffee is and so on and so forth.
That’s a lot to take in, but remember, to some degree it’s subjective. One roaster’s light is another roaster’s medium. Use it as a basic guideline, maybe get a feel for what your favorite roaster’s light/medium/dark scale translates to, and just have a good time trying things out. Tastes change and so does coffee and the industry that works with it. I hope you now feel more ready than ever to conquer your next coffee purchase. You got this!
