Light roast coffee

K

Kay Bixler

Kay Bixler
I have been trying to gain an appreciation for good coffee but it is ultimately just coming across as weak. After trying some recommended beans at home and even buying pricey cups from Blue Bottle I just keep going back to my terrior-free, dark roast, South American staple.

What is everyone else's take on this? Any coffee snobs here?
 
I like the coffee from George Howell.. Light, Dark, whatever and no longer the premium in price compared to what they're getting in NYC these days. As far as being "weak", this is more of a technique issue vs. a roast issue IMO. I am assuming you are referring to standard brewed fare? Try switching to single cup pour over - it can be plenty strong.
 
Thanks, Jason, have heard of George Howell and will try his stuff. At home I use a French press but I have had pour over at coffee shops.
 
originally posted by Kay Bixler:
Light roast coffeeI have been trying to gain an appreciation for good coffee but it is ultimately just coming across as weak. After trying some recommended beans at home and even buying pricey cups from Blue Bottle I just keep going back to my terrior-free, dark roast, South American staple.

What is everyone else's take on this? Any coffee snobs here?
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not a coffee snob. clearly. i just can't find a light roast that i like near as much as dark roast, and i've tried really top notch roasters like stumptown. for me, light roast coffee reminds me of the taste of a stick from an ice cream bar after the ice cream is gone. which i do not like.

one large mug of very strong cup of dark roast pour-over first thing in the morning and my coffee needs have been met for the day.
 
originally posted by Kay Bixler:
Light roast coffeeI have been trying to gain an appreciation for good coffee but it is ultimately just coming across as weak. After trying some recommended beans at home and even buying pricey cups from Blue Bottle I just keep going back to my terrior-free, dark roast, South American staple.

What is everyone else's take on this? Any coffee snobs here?
Click to expand...

I've tried many ways to brew coffee. Pour over isn't the best way. French press - for me at least - is one of the worst.

Try: https://www.sweetmarias.com/product/clever-coffee-dripper-large

Wash the filter first with hot water. The coffee is brewed and then drains into a cup. With pour over you get bitter extractives in the 2nd and 3rd pour over. With the clever dripper, you pour once.

As far as roast goes, I think you can taste the coffee better when it is roasted lighter, but it is really a matter of preference. I suspect not everyone will agree, but dark roast really masks the flavor; a good analogy might be oaky California cabernet (for the dark roast). Many of us started there and then - over time - our taste changes.

I don't like Blue Bottle. I find they often over-roast. I generally buy organic beans from Counter Culture, which is a local roaster in Durham, NC. In SF, I liked Four Barrel and Sightglass. I find Stumptown highly overrated.
 
originally posted by mark e:
originally posted by Kay Bixler:
Light roast coffeeI have been trying to gain an appreciation for good coffee but it is ultimately just coming across as weak. After trying some recommended beans at home and even buying pricey cups from Blue Bottle I just keep going back to my terrior-free, dark roast, South American staple.

What is everyone else's take on this? Any coffee snobs here?
Click to expand...

I've tried many ways to brew coffee. Pour over isn't the best way. French press - for me at least - is one of the worst.

Try: https://www.sweetmarias.com/product/clever-coffee-dripper-large

Wash the filter first with hot water. The coffee is brewed and then drains into a cup. With pour over you get bitter extractives in the 2nd and 3rd pour over. With the clever dripper, you pour once.

As far as roast goes, I think you can taste the coffee better when it is roasted lighter, but it is really a matter of preference. I suspect not everyone will agree, but dark roast really masks the flavor; a good analogy might be oaky California cabernet (for the dark roast). Many of us started there and then - over time - our taste changes.

I don't like Blue Bottle. I find they often over-roast. I generally buy organic beans from Counter Culture, which is a local roaster in Durham, NC. In SF, I liked Four Barrel and Sightglass. I find Stumptown highly overrated.
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I follow this method, except I do 2 pours. One to wet the coffee and bloom it, the second with he rest of the water. I've found that grind and ratio are the most important.

I also generally use Counter Culture, but I do order from Parlor in Brooklyn ,w ho I've found to be excellent.

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parlorcoffee.com

Sightglass is excellent, I always bring some home.
 
I'm with Mark e and VLM. I started with Peet's at, as TomHill would say, "the very start," in this case the opening of his eponymous Walnut Square store in '67. About 10 years ago, I tasted my first "third wave" coffee from Intelligentsia in Chicago. Since that time, I've also tried Coava beans when I was in Portland (thanks, Vincent!). I find, as Mark e said, that the flavor of the beans is more apparent with the lighter roasts. Dark roast now dominates the flavor palate to me, like high toast new oak. I've also discovered that the lighter roasted beans retain their aromatics longer, which is important to me since I only drink one cup per day.

Mark Lipton
 
my wife patrice is a coffee snob and I'm a technologist so we set off on a journey of research and experimentation with the goal of making better coffee than our local (award winning) coffee shop.

In the end, we bought this grinder:
baratza virtuoso

this roaster:
sr500 roaster

this coffee container:
fris coffee vault

this coffee maker (though she likes just about any french press):
aeropress coffee maker

and she buys green coffee beans at:
sweet marias

she roasts about a weeks supply of beans in one sitting, so the beans are always fresh. the equipment has paid for itself many times over as green coffee beans are much less expensive than roasted beans.

she experiments with roast levels and has discovered it's important to pair roast level to bean. Over the last couple of years she's gravitated towards much lighter roasts.

Most people who try her coffee say it's the best they've ever had. I couldn't say as I don't drink coffee.
 
The big question is what you mean by "weak." Do you mean caffeine or bitterness or texture or something else entirely? It's certainly possible that the current trend toward lighter roasting is just not something you'll enjoy, but there is such a wide range of flavors within that realm that I doubt that's true.

Coffee just has so many variables that finding the right coffee shop or right equipment for home is crucial.

With a lot of the roasters mentioned -- Howell and Sightglass... or Anthology here in Detroit -- the idea is that they're showing the "terroir" and the brew method will offer up the various sides of that terroir. But within that, if you don't grind the beans at exactly the right coarseness, the coffee will come off as overly weak or overly bitter. Espresso is obviously the most finnicky expression of coffee, but even still, it's telling that when I calibrate my grinder and espresso machine at my restaurant each morning, it's wildly different than it was the night before even though the equipment hasn't changed. The variables are very real.

I find pour over the best method, but the actual method is not just a show. You have to have the right coarseness of grind, the right water temp, a filtered water source, and the right equipment. If you don't, the coffee will come off as thin or watery or whatever.

All of that said, the current trends emphasize diversity of flavor. Some people just want coffee to taste like coffee, and then finding a darker, more bitter roast might be up your alley. But if your coffee is simply "weak," I'd bet there are things you can do in terms of how you brew rather than jumping to darker roasts.

For home use, I'd personally recommend either the Virtuoso grinder or a Capresso (both burr grinders) in the affordable range. They're adjustable burr grinders that create a good, even grind. A Chemex or a V60 or other drip cone is adequate, but just tweak the grinder to the grind that you like. Counter Culture offers some good intro videos for ratios of coffee to water if you haven't tinkered with it before. But there are a million ways to do it. Those are very solid places to start for home use, though. I think you'll find it's less about the roast and more about (a) where the beans came from and (b) how you ultimately made the coffee.
 
Good quality beans are the first step of course, I tend towards Indonesian and east African myself, but have had good coffee from all over. A dark roast can be delicious in some instances and uses, but I agree it is the coffee equivalent of new oak barrels. On the other hand, I've yet to encounter a really light roast coffee that impressed me.

I think our coffee quality jumped a notch when we got a high quality burr grinder and bought small batches of freshly roasted beans, and ground them just before making the coffee.

We've done French press, stovetop Bialetti espresso pots, had some good espresso machines, but my favorite coffee currently is made using the ROK, essentially a manual pressure espresso maker. Once you've got the amount of coffee and packing density figured out, which took only a few rounds of experimentation, the quality is remarkable.

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www.gadgetreview.com
 
I make coffee only very rarely. It's so hard to make a good cup without equipment and I just can't deal with it, um, er, before coffee.

On weekends, I have become a regular at Swallow. I almost always get a pour-over and between the weighing, the grinding, the temperature management, the pours (as described by VLM), pre-heating the carafe and the cup, I get really excellent coffee.

They source about half their beans from Counter Culture, about a quarter from Heart, and the rest from various sources. They try to keep three kinds on offer. A little chalkboard provides a TN for each coffee and I can occasionally see what they mean. (One of the baristas tells me that the beans change with time so, even left whole, you get a different experience every few days.)

I did have to overcome "this is watery, more like tea than coffee" feelings. I now treat a pour-over much like a wine: this is a moment in its existence and I can take it in, maybe for simple delight and maybe to think about this cup and maybe to think more broadly about it.

Dark roasts are, really, a different animal.
 
come on, it's coffee. it's caffeine--the catapult that launches you in good spirits in to the new day. to bring you out of the cobwebs and into the new morning. to connect brain cells that have drifted apart whilst in the land of nod. it's a fix.
 
Lots of good and consistent information here. Some key points that can be easy to achieve and others more difficult. Grinder - the Baratza grinder is an excellent entry level burr grinder (the one I use) that will start you on the path to geekdom. Home roasting - unless you drink or brew a lot of coffee this is about the only way to stay in the sweet spot of the life span of roasted coffee beans. As Cole pointed out, freshly roasted coffee needs a few days rest and after roasting and then is best for only about two weeks after roasting. I think that staying on top of the age of the roasted coffee is why you can find consistently good coffee at your local geeky coffee shop.
 
I think you can dive as deeply as you want with this.

I buy the freshest single origin beans that I can find from Counter Culture, so I bounce around between continents. I've looked into roasting my own a few times, but have been talked out of it by a friend who is a coffee importer (he sells beans to Counter Culture, Heart, Parlor, Sightglass, all the top roasters). He makes the point that there is something about professional people with professional equipment that elevates the roast. If I were to change anything, this would be it, but mostly for freshness reasons.

I have a grind coarseness that works for me, I don't adjust it for different kinds of coffee (Indonesian vs Colombian vs Ethiopian) which is what they do in top coffee spots. I also use a Breville smart grinder which has the same burrs as the Italian models, but it has a timer instead of having to manually watch grind amount. There is a bit of variability, maybe .5-1 gram, but I live with it.

I kind of have the temparture down. I boil water in a kettle then pour it into a preheated measuring cup to a set amount of water (I shoot for 18:1 ratio). The water cools off a bit before the bloom pour, when the cap cracks, I pour in the rest of the water using a circular motion.

I prewash the filter (which I buy at Costco) and preheat the cone (I use a cheap ceramic model, not the expensive Japanese model) and mug (the same one I've been drinking out of for 30 years, it has an escargot on it).

I figure my coffee is squarely in the MM 88-92 point range. I could improve every

Most importantly, start to finish it takes me about 5 minutes and it's pretty easy and not all that expensive.
 
"I've looked into roasting my own a few times, but have been talked out of it by a friend who is a coffee importer".

while your friend makes a sensible point, the price of entry is fairly low for the sr500, it will quickly pay for itself and allows you to experiment with different roast levels rather than relying on the roaster to choose the perfect level for your palate.
 
I agree with VLM that if you obsessively shop for fresh beans from a good importer/roaster than you can do much better than I do roasting at home. But if you not so obsessively pick up stuff at Whole Foods (say) once a week then you can do better roasting at home.
 
This is like asking: do you vote Republican or Democrat. It really is a partisan issue. You either like light roast coffee, or dark roast. I haven't seen too many conversions from one to the other. Next time you drop off your wines in Ithaca (besides letting me know before they get sold out@!), try the coffees at Ithaca Coffee Co. They do light roast well enough for me, whereas Gimme tends to roast them a little more, so maybe they would be up your alley.
 
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