MediumRoastSteam as always, it’s probably not quite as easy as it seems.
Yes, we could publish the numbers, but unless they are meaningful, it’s potentially going to cause more confusion. I don’t think that these are reasons not to provide the colour readings, but:
Hardly any roasters have colour readers that can provide Agtron-scale readings. These machines cost many thousands of pounds and tend to be used more by big commodity market roasters. So, of the small number of roasters that do measure colour, there are a few different machines being used that may give reliable results, but they’re probably using proprietary scales and may not even be reliably calibrated with other machines from the same manufacturer.
The whole idea of light, medium, dark is not universally agreed upon as far as I know. e.g. when I take a reading fro a roast, it may be ‘130’, which I would think of as ‘light’. What I’m actually thinking is ‘the colour suggests that we may be around as light as we can go’ - to achieve coffee that is soluble enough and roasted in a way that fits in with our style. Another roaster may consider coffee the same colour to be medium.
Similarly, we have a coffee that we would consider ‘dark for us’ - but that coffee is nowhere near what most people would consider a dark roast - there is no oil on the outside of the beans. This coffee could be as dark as we ever go, but considered ‘light’ by another roaster.
It could be useful of rust to publish all the numbers, just so that people who know our coffee can determine whether they want something lighter/darker than they had last time I guess, but then we get into the whole thing of colour being only a part of what makes a coffee more or less ‘developed’ in terms of the roast.
Yep, you’ve guessed it - a rabbit hole lurks. 😊
