• Beans

  • Relationship between roast levels and taste

For all of the years that I have drunk espresso based milk drinks, I have assumed that i preferred medium/plus roasted beans. I like the taste of coffee which needs to be fairly strong to cut through milk. Yet here I am drinking a pretty light bean in the Moccamaster and enjoying it, so, my question is:

Is there a relationship between roast levels and taste? If you roast a bean a certain way and it ends up as being lightly roasted and tasting of sherbert lemons, if you roast it a bit further will it have a completely different set of charachteristics or just be a more developed relation?

https://www.suddencardiacarrestuk.org/2024/02/thank-goodness-for-madeira-cake/

As I understand it, the beans have an intrinsic flavour profile, but the darker the roast, the less of those flavours come through and the more traditional roasted coffee flavours are brought out. So a dark roast would have fewer of the lemon sherbert flavour and darker notes instead. A lighter roasted version however would have more lemon sherbert, but less body and more acidity.

I have realised I actually enjoy light roasted coffees with milk, as the sweet milk counteracts the acidity that exists with light roasts.

Darker roasts stand up better to espresso brewing, even a little under-extracted they can still be fairly pleasant as acidity is attenuated by roast level (whereas light roasts can be very sharp/tart).

For filter, the coffee produced is often less acidic, even at the same extraction, than espresso. You might get tangy coffee, rather than really sharp/tart notes. Darker roasts for filter can heavily mute acidity and specific notes, tasting more of burnt plant matter/toast (but still be fine as espresso).

The Darkwoods El Placer Purple fruits is very nice, but more light/medium than my idea of light (they rank it 2 out of 5 roast level). This is about as dark as I would go for drip filter (maybe darker for French press/Sowden?).

Drip filter (as opposed to immersion) is the closest thing to ‘brute force’ brewing, you can extract light roasts easily to normal levels & quickly. Even under-developed roasts can extract normally as drip/pour over (whilst tasting bad, but that is down to a roast error, rather than extraction).

I don’t take milk/dairy in coffee, so this may affect my roast preferences…actually, that’s a slight lie, I do like an afogato from time to time and light roasts are usually horrid for this & other desserts where cream/cheese are involved.

I’m now using a medium roasted bean for espresso for the first time, coming from medium/dark. What I try is to reduce the acidity so that the taste notes of caramel and apricot (not in a sour, but subtle way) come out. Made one or two nice cups, but is also quite difficult because there is not much margin between too sour and too bitter (according to my taste).

    Brainbox There should be quite a big shift in grind & or ratio, in order to go from under-extraction to over-extraction. It’s not usually a knife edge situation unless you have a stepped grinder, with steps that are too large.

    If, after small adjustments to negate sharp sourness, you are straight away starting to get bitter flavours come up, it’s worth trying to push through and increase extraction a little more. The reason for this is that at the low end of normal, as you get past the sharp/tart under-extracted tastes, you often hit a drier/charred tasting area before you get into the ripe fruit acidity range.

    Grinding too fine can also increase bitterness at all extraction levels. The bitterness of over-extraction is quite different to other types of bitterness you can encounter, it’s very drying, like smoke that gets worse farther down the cup.

        MWJB Yes, true. As a beginning espresso maker, my problem was how to assess the ‘easy’ parameters like grinding and brew temperature. While grinding should be straight forward, my puck preparation was so bad that it was difficult to check the effect objectively. In the beginning, after changing grind size, I had to make maybe 10 cups to see the effect. Trying to get the average taste out of 10 or so cups that way, which in itself is subjective. It is a chicken-egg issue, you need the basic grind size right to make good pucks, but to judge the effect of grind size …

        Anyway, after puck preparation practice of a few weeks, I’m now able to get almost predictable results with the 2 coffee’s I have. Up to the next one.