End Roast Profiling... Start Profile Roasting!

When it comes to coffee purchasing, there exists a horrible affliction called Roast Profiling, a mental disease that leads to wrongful assumptions about cup character based on 'roast level'. If your buying decisions have ever been swayed by the words light, dark, or medium, before even learning what the flavor profile of a coffee is... well, then I'm afraid you've been diagnosed positive. We're in this together though, as we have paired our coffees with roast level in such a way, and for so long, that even our own purchasing behavior has been located deeply within its paradigmatic grasp... and we never even knew it. As coffee purveyors we are also educators. In the past we have trained our customers to locate and identify the roast level of a coffee, using it as the determining factor in a purchasing decision. Our longtime retail customers can remember our dichotomy of offerings as Featured Roast and Daily Brew, the darker and the lighter offerings respectively. We have asked you to become experts on the subject, really. Well, there is much more to coffee than its roast level, so it's now our duty to step up and educate beyond the color scheme.Before going any further, let me offer that whether it's a bright acidity or bitter finish that's desirable to you, you are never wrong about what your preferences are. No one is. Taste is one of our most personal senses, as we cannot taste from a distance the way that we see or hear. No, a person is not wrong when it comes to taste, but they can be more informed about what it is that they taste and why they taste it. We're here to educate on this point, so keep this thought in mind as you read on.

A coffee's 'roast level' or 'roast degree' is often thought of as the color tint, how dark or light a coffee is. Color, although it is quantifiable and measured by the reflectance of light of the coffee's surface, is neither universally accepted nor indicative of a coffee's flavor. We often assume that the darker the coffee is, the stronger the brew is. In many cases, this is true, as darker roasted coffee tends to have more solubility and the resulting extraction is more saturated. However, if all coffees are extracted properly, the level of roast of the coffee used in the resulting brew doesn't matter. What does matter are the indicated flavor profile and cup characteristics, and trusting your own taste preferences. Because when it comes down to it, relying on color or roast level hardly provides an informed assessment of coffee flavor.

In reality, there are over 1,000 different aromatic and flavor compounds in roasted coffee, making it possibly the most complex food in your kitchen. Compressing that complexity into 4 or 5 categories of 'roast level' is perhaps the fastest way to dumb down an articulate, quality product to educated consumers. What I want to convey here is this: when it comes to offering properly roasted, high quality coffee, roast levels are arbitrary and have no place in their presentation.

In its most simplistic definition, roasting is the process by which the coffee seed is made edible for consumption. The roasting process is the means to the end, and in the end there should be no premeditated dark or light roasts, but only these 3 possibilities:The coffee is too underdeveloped, flavors taste vegetalThe coffee is properly developed, flavors are revealed and highlightedThe coffee is degraded, nuances masked by improper and over roastingOf course, all of this has little meaning without the context of the quality of the green coffee (coffee seed) itself. If the quality of the green coffee is poor, then all that 'proper development' will do is highlight the intrinsic negative characteristics of the coffee (defects and the off tastes of cellulose). If the green coffee is of high quality and has complexity, uniqueness, balance and sweetness, then it is the roaster's job to develop, reveal and highlight these characteristics.

If you think about it, the road to roast level ideology was paved long ago by the marketing giants at major commercial coffee operations (your basic grocery store coffees) and their products don't taste very good. Why? One reason is that these operations race-to-the-bottom for cheap, commodity grade coffee, with poor flavor, thus necessitating the need to mask the negative characteristics by way of over roasting. So, it is in possibility #3, the degradation and masking for flavors, where all of the big name commercial, and some smaller roasters who follow suit, are constantly and consistently located. This is the main reason why roast levels are so pervasive in our ideas of coffee - the coffee is bad to begin with.In the world of Specialty and boutique coffee, however, there is no place for roast level, only proper development. As pioneer George Howell says, "If the duck is delicious, why smother it in sauce."

At the Gimme roastery, manual Profile Roasting - finding the correct time and temperature curve for a coffee in order to reveal the beautiful aromatics and flavor nuances of a coffee - is what we obsess over day after day. Finding the correct profile for a coffee takes a skilled mind, and achieving that same profile small batch by small batch takes a skilled hand. We roast each batch of coffee manually, using time and temperature, smell, sight, sound and taste as our guides. Whether or not the properly developed roast has a color tint lighter or darker than another is quite beside to the goal. We can roast the same coffee two different ways (two different profiles), but to the same color specification, and we end up having two drastically different results.

So, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you (yes, you) are 100% above choosing coffees based on roast degrees and color tints alone. Starting October 4th, 2010, in an effort to End Roast Profiling, we will slowly phase out the use of roast level indicators on our product packaging. Instead, we will focus on emphasizing the flavor characteristics of each coffee product. The coffee inside the bag will be the same coffee you've been enjoying, but you'll just know more about what you taste. Go on... trust your preferences, you're never wrong.

To understand more about what you taste and why you taste it, we invite you to attend our weekly free cupping on Saturdays in our State St. store (coming soon to Brooklyn!!).

The Gimme blog is a collaboration that gives voice to people across our company. Opinions expressed by our authors are uncensored, and are not necessarily the opinions of Gimme! Coffee. If you need a company statement, or any other type of response, please contact us.

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