Choosing a roasting style that suits your tastes and needs isn’t always easy, even for an initiate.
Bean colors, point rating systems, confusing marketing names… It’s hard to find your way around and choose a coffee that’s right for you.
Roasting practices have evolved with time and cultures, and today we offer a wider range than ever, adapted to everyone’s tastes, which can be summed up as follows:
- Dark Roast: strong, bitter, caffeinated
- Light roast: subtle, light, tangy, precise
- Medium roast: balanced, deep, accessible
But let’s get back to the basics of the process and explore the triforce of great roasting styles present from our supermarkets to our small local independents.
What is roasting?
Simply put, roasting is the action of cooking a coffee.
Since coffee is basically a cherry seed, it is cooked in a roaster (the machine) by a roaster (the craftsman) to make it edible. Cooking, through various chemical processes, makes the grain more or less crumbly and soluble.
It‘s the combination of temperature and cooking time that will produce significant differences in the results of our favorite mugs. An analogy can be made between cooking coffee and cooking a large piece of meat or a potato.
More or less thorough roasting may or may not allow certain aromas to develop. The longer you cook it, the more terroir aromas you’ll discover. Whether it’s fruit in Ethiopia or Kenya, flowers in Colombia or Rwanda, nuts in Brazil or China, cocoa in El Salvador…
Be careful not to overcook, however, or you’ll burn the coffee and create toasty, smoky notes, accompanied by an unpleasant bitterness.
On the other hand, you can’t be too shy either! Like a potato, a lack of cooking will make the coffee “floaty” and give it a very vegetal taste, sometimes of fresh grass… Not great for waking up in the morning.
But how do you choose? Depending on your tastes, of course, but also on your barista equipment and our know-how, because some coffees can be temperamental…
Dark roast – The force
Want to make sure no one in the office steals your coffee? Does bitterness and toast appeal to you? Looking for the biggest possible slap in the face to wake up your sleeping brain?
This is the roast for you!
Also known as French, Italian or simply traditional roasting, this roasting swaps the subtlety of the terroir for a formidable mouthfeel and an increased amount of caffeine.
It is easily recognized by its dark brown or even black grains and, above all, its shiny, almost oily surface.
In fact, as the beans are more degraded during the roasting process, the amount of caffeine per bean is higher than in lighter roasts. Perfect for keeping you awake during revisions or on the eve of an unbearable deadline.
As most of this style of roasting is destined for supermarkets, you’ll be able to stock up wherever you are, from hypermarkets to country mini-markets.
It’s also this style that means you’ll never miss a coffee. The beans, burnt and sometimes almost charred, become so soluble that it’s almost impossible not to make a full-bodied, tasty coffee, even without a recipe or measurements.
So it’s hard to recommend any particular method of preparation: whether you prefer a well-packed Italian-style ristretto or a large filter coffee maker to last all day, the force will always be with you!
Light roast – Courage
Do you like a challenge? Do you have the right barista equipment? Do you always dilute your coffee because it’s too strong? Do you like green tea?
So here’s the light at the end of the tunnel for you!
Very light roasts, sometimes called Scandinavian or Nordic, are indeed very popular in Northern Europe, one of the world’s highest per capita coffee consumers.
You can recognize these grains by their very light brown color, almost like firewood.
The aim of these roasts is to preserve as much of the original terroir as possible, sometimes at the cost of bean solubility and clear development. That’s why you need to be all the more vigilant and knowledgeable about a coffee’s characteristics: origin, region, process, altitude… Every detail is important here.
In fact, lower cooking temperatures make some of the coffee’s aromatic components more difficult to access. So you’ll have to redouble your recipe testing to get a cup that doesn’t smell like vegetable soup.
However, if you’re looking for low-bodied, low-sugar coffees that bring out the acidity potential of their terroirs, and you’re sufficiently equipped to prepare precise recipes, then get closer to your nearest hipster-torrefactor!
Because here, without a quality mill, precise scales and water with the right minerality, the road to a decent cup is bound to be tortuous and full of disappointments…
When it comes to finding such coffees, only a specialty coffee roaster will be able to offer you such a range. So find out if there’s one in your town, or look on the internet, as most of these roasters offer delivery from their websites.
This is also why these roasts are generally recommended for filter methods only. The lightness doesn’t match up well with what you’d expect from an espresso.
Medium Roast – Wisdom
Are you the type to compromise? Do you hate bitterness but still want to travel through the unspoilt terroir of a well-balanced coffee?
Medium roast, also known as omniroast, is easily adapted to your tastes and needs, from medium dark if you prefer to emphasize the body to medium light if you want to highlight the acidity of a coffee.
As a result, the color of the beans will inevitably vary from slightly dark brown to light brown, as well as from dark chocolate to milk chocolate.
This is where we generally find the best compromise between ease of extraction and terroir development. A scale is always good company in this adventure, but is not always indispensable.
This roast offers an excellent entry point for those who wish to progress in their appreciation of terroir coffee without immediately entering into considerations of recipes worthy of a DUT in applied chemistry or having the impression of drinking a squeezed lemon.
Many independent roasters have a range of medium-roasted coffees, or even their entire range. So it’s easy to select several coffees to discover their differences and find the one or ones that will best accompany you on a daily basis.
When it comes to preparation methods, we’re once again at the center of the hemicycle. In fact, these coffees are just as suitable for espresso as for classic or manual filter.
Which part of the roasting triforce will you choose to adopt?
As a Barista, I can only recommend medium roasting, but above all you should get in touch with your local roaster, who will be able to give you the best advice.
But remember, the best coffee is the one you love!