Understanding roast levels and their flavour impact
It begins with a raw product, full of potential but lacking extractable flavour, and transforms into a roasted product boasting a diverse array of fragrance, aroma and flavour attributes. The roaster's role is to balance the coffee’s acidity, sweetness, body, and bitterness. Equally important is empowering consumers to comprehend their purchase and extract their desired flavours.
Roasting coffee involves applying heat to raw beans, transforming them into the aromatic roasted coffee we enjoy. While you can use a frying pan or a domestic oven, professional coffee roasters offer the best results. These machines blend and heat the coffee evenly. Most commercial roasters use a combination of gas and airflow for roasting. The roaster's expertise comes into play in deciding how much heat is added, and when. Roast levels, categorised as light, medium, and dark, significantly impact the coffee's flavour profile, akin to rare, medium-rare, or well-done steaks.
Coffee is a natural product. It is grown, picked, sorted and processed to try and make it as uniform as possible, but not every bean is exactly the same. Think about when you buy a bunch of grapes, they’re not all identical. This is part of the beauty of coffee, but also the bane of a coffee roaster’s existence. They’re trying to create a repeatable, uniform product out of something naturally diverse and complex.
If you have a poor quality raw product, no roaster or barista can fix it. Poor quality coffee can be caused by so many things; unripe fruit being picked, improper processing of the coffee fruit, under or over-fermentation, improper drying, poor storage conditions, and the list goes on. Therefore the first and most important job of a coffee roaster is to purchase good quality coffee.
Once a good quality coffee has arrived at the roastery, it’s the roaster’s job to not screw it up. Every coffee has a unique mix of aromatic and flavour characteristics; acidity, fruitiness, sweetness, body, bitterness etc. It’s the roaster’s job to find a sweet spot, which allows these characteristics to be extracted in a balanced way. There is no correct way to roast a coffee, but rather a roaster’s interpretation of the way they feel a particular coffee is best enjoyed. As coffee roasters ourselves, we see our job as an important step in the coffee chain. The coffees we buy are inherently sweet, and that is what we want to showcase the most; the coffee’s sweetness. The more a coffee is roasted, the more acidity and fragrance are sacrificed for body and texture. So if a cup of coffee with a light, bright flavour profile is desired, a gentler, lighter roasting style is appropriate. If a rich, heavy cup of coffee is the goal, a longer roasting period would be more suitable. The roasting style can easily showcase a coffee’s character, or overpower it.
Coffee preferences vary widely among consumers. Some enjoy large lattes, while others prefer filtered coffee. At our roastery, we select coffees with specific end-uses in mind. For customers that enjoy light and bright filtered coffee, we’ll choose a coffee with naturally high levels of acidity, brightness, sweetness and fragrance and we’ll roast it lightly to maintain that profile. Conversely, for those that want a rich, sweet espresso, we’ll choose a coffee with high body and sweetness, and we’ll roast it slightly longer to accentuate those characteristics. How to explain a coffee’s flavour profile to a customer is a nuanced process. We’ve taken the ‘keep it simple’ method when it comes to flavour descriptors, choosing just a few simple terms like rich, sweet or fruity. We choose to focus more on the roast level (i.e. light or medium), to describe the likely flavour profile of the coffee. We don’t roast coffee as a dark roast, in the same way that we don’t like well-done steaks. It’s not that it’s incorrect, it’s just not our favourite style.
Over time, a coffee roastery establishes its unique roasting style and product offerings. We're incredibly thankful that our customers appreciate our roasting style, and we take great joy in sharing our carefully crafted coffees with them.