3 BUYING IT
Coffee stores, real and virtual
What all the names mean
Roast names and roast taste
A first decision in drinking coffee is how and where to buy it. The decision is complicated by roasted coffee’s vulnerability to staling. Freshly roasted coffee is at its best about a day out of the roaster. If it is kept in an airtight container as whole, unground beans, it can remain splendid if ground and brewed in a week to ten days. But by three weeks out of the roaster, it is well on its way to listless mediocrity.
Roasted coffee beans constitute a natural package for the volatile, delicate oils that supply coffee’s aroma and flavor. Storing coffee in whole-bean form and grinding it immediately before brewing is a first and essential step to experiencing it at its peak.
Delivering It Fresh
But strategies differ on how to deliver those whole beans to the consumer with minimum flavor loss. One way is to roast the coffee and sell it within a week after roasting. Freshly roasted coffee naturally degasses by emitting carbon dioxide. This slowly discharging gas protects the beans from penetration by oxygen and consequent staling. Roasters both small and large pursue this “roast it and move it” approach. When a coffee stays around too long owing to unexpected buying patterns, the store may start brewing it as the “coffee of the day” until it’s gone or even donating it to a food bank or charity.
However, the roast-it-and-move-it strategy demands discipline and a deep commitment to coffee ethics. Other roasters take a less tricky route. Immediately after roasting, they seal the whole-bean coffee in bags that have been flushed with inert gas to chase out oxygen. Thereafter the carbon dioxide produced by the coffee slowly trickles out a one-way valve, further defending the coffee against staling.
Such gas-flushed valve bags are remarkably effective in preserving coffee freshness. Manufacturers of the bags claim that they preserve flavor and aromatics for up to three or more months. In fact, most responsible coffee sellers take no chances and aim at about six to eight weeks. The one problem with such bags: When the coffee first emerges from the bag, it tastes roaster fresh. But thereafter it seems to degrade in flavor a bit more rapidly than freshly roasted coffee.
The absolutely most responsible approach is pursued by roasters who pack their coffee in valve bags but date the bags and pull them off the shelves after about three weeks.
Simply because coffee is sold as whole beans in bins does not mean it has not seen the inside of a valve bag, by the way. Many large roasters, Starbucks included, ship their coffee to their stores in five-pound valve bags, which are then opened and dumped into the bins.
WHERE TO BUY: STORES AND INTERNET
In most metropolitan areas coffee aficionados can buy coffee from specialized coffee stores or from upscale (and sometimes some not-so-upscale) supermarkets. On the Internet coffees can be ordered directly from sites supporting by roasting companies (peets.com, for example; www.allegro-coffee.com; www.armeno.com; etc.) or through a handful of websites (www.greatcoffee.com, www.gocoffee.com) that sell a variety of coffees from roasters across the country. See “Sending for It.”
For freshness nothing beats buying coffee from places that roast the coffee in the same store where it is sold. In-store roasting, as it is called in the coffee business, is a growing, if still minor, component of the specialty coffee scene. Next up in size are small roasting companies with three or four stores, then medium-sized chains and wholesale roasters whose coffees appear in locations all around a given metropolitan area. Finally, a growing number of chains and franchises have spread themselves over an entire region or sometimes two or three regions. At this writing Starbucks is the only truly national specialty coffee chain.
Although single-store roasters appeal deeply to the coffee romantic in me, the best coffee being roasted in the United States today is produced by medium-sized, regional roasting companies, the kind with perhaps five to thirty stores or outlets. I wish this were not so, and that the single-store roasters were staying up with their somewhat bigger rivals in terms of quality, but at the moment few are. I have to assume that they lack both the resources to compete for the best coffees and the technical knowledge to produce the best roast. Their main edge, and a very significant one, is freshness and customer satisfaction at buying close to the source.
If you want to come to know coffee intimately and enjoy it as fresh as possible, you may want to consider roasting your own, an enjoyable and surprisingly simple procedure (see here).
THE COFFEE LEXICON
Stores may carry as many as thirty varieties of coffee. Internet sites may offer even more. Each one has a name, plus a few aliases. The whole business is not quite as complicated as it may appear at first encounter, however. No matter how many names there are, they all refer to the degree to which the bean is roasted, the place the bean came from before it was roasted, the dealer’s name for a blend of beans, or a flavoring that was added to the beans after they were roasted.
European Names
Suppose you are in a traditional specialty coffee store examining the beans in the glass-fronted bins. Some, you notice, are darker in color than others. You may also note that most names given these darker coffees are European: French, Italian, Viennese, Continental. These names do not refer to the origin of the beans. Rather, they refer to degree of roast, or how far along the beans have been brought from green to light brown to medium brown to dark brown to almost black. Something called an Italian roast, for example, usually is darker in color and has been carried deeper into the roast spectrum than something called a Viennese roast. If a dark-roast coffee comes from a single origin, it usually is given a double label such as Dark-Roast Colombia or Italian-Roast Mexican. In other cases, however, dark-roast coffees are a blend of beans from a variety of origins, in which case the name refers only to the roast, not to the origin of the bean.
Non-European Names
Next to the coffees with European names, you may note coffees that have a similar degree of darkness and carry non-European names, such as Sumatra, Kenya, or Mexican. Unlike the coffees with European names, these coffees are usually brought to about the same degree of roast or to what the roaster feels is the optimum roast to bring out the distinctive qualities of the coffee. The determining difference between these coffees is not the roast but the origin of the bean. A coffee labeled Sumatra, for instance, should consist entirely of beans from a single country, Sumatra. Since coffee can be grown successfully only in or very near the tropics, such single-origin coffees tend to carry names of an exotic and sultry timbre.
Single-origin coffees, in addition to the name of the country in which they originated, often carry qualifying names: Guatemala Antigua, Kenya AA, Brazil Bourbon Santos, Sumatra Mandheling, Costa Rica La Minita. Most of these qualifying terms are either grade designations (AA) or market names referring, directly or indirectly, to coffee-growing regions (Antigua, Mandheling, Santos). A few, such as Bourbon, describe a botanical variety of Coffea arabica. And more and more often, the specific name of a particular farm, estate, or cooperative (in this case La Minita) will appear.
Market Names
I discuss market names at length in Chapter 5, under the countries to which they refer. There are literally thousands in the coffee trade, but only the most famous find their way into the vocabulary of the specialty-coffee retailer. Some derive from the name of a district, province, or state; others from a mountain range or similar landmark; others from a nearby important city; and still others from the name of a port or shipping point. Oaxaca coffees from Mexico are named for the state of Oaxaca; the Kilimanjaro coffees of Tanzania for the slopes of the mountain on which these coffees are grown. The Harrar coffees of Ethiopia take their name from the province and city of Harrar; the Santos coffees of Brazil from the name of the port through which they are traditionally shipped.
Three famous names in coffee. Top, a parade float in the Kona Coffee Cultural Festival, Kona, Hawaii. Middle, sign invoking the traditional name for Yemen coffee: Mokha or Mocha. Bottom, the town that gave its name to the famous Yirgacheffe coffee of Ethiopia.
Grade Names
Retailers may also qualify coffee labels by grade name. Grading is a device for controlling the quality of an agricultural commodity so that buyer and seller can do business without personally examining every lot sold. Coffee-grading terminology is, unfortunately, varied and obscure. Every coffee-growing country has its own set of terms, and few are distinguished by logical clarity. Kenya AA is an exception: Clearly AA is better than A or B. But through the Colombian terms excelso and supremo are both laudatory, one could hardly determine by reason alone that supremo is the highest grade of Colombian coffee, and excelso a more comprehensive grade consisting of a mixture of supremo and the less desirable extra grade. Although we may be aware that altitude is a prime grading factor in Central American coffees, one could hardly guess without coaching that “strictly hard bean” refers to Guatemalan coffees grown at altitudes of 4,500 to 5,000 feet, and “hard bean” to those at 4,000 to 4,500 feet. The higher the altitude, the slower-maturing the bean, and the harder and denser its substance—hence, hard bean.
Estate Names
The latest development in the specialty coffee world is the marketing of coffee by estate, rather than by regional name, market name, or grade. A coffee estate is, properly speaking, simply a coffee farm, and an estate coffee is a coffee that has been kept separate from other coffees on its way from that farm to the consumer. “Estates” may range from tiny three-acre plots lovingly tilled by part-time farmers in the Kona district of Hawaii, to vast, technologically sophisticated farms in Brazil that stretch for tens of miles. Sometimes “estate coffees” may come from a cooperative of farms or from several farms in a district and may merit the estate designation only because they were collected and processed at the same mill.
The term estate has a long history in the coffee business, but its latest use in the specialty coffee trade is based on analogy with the wine industry’s “estate-bottled” idea and was pioneered by William McAlpin of La Minita farm of the Tarrazu district of Costa Rica. Starting in the 1980s, McAlpin successfully established La Minita in the consciousness of the specialty coffee trade through careful and consistent preparation of the farm’s coffee together with promotional efforts like a color brochure and a documentary video tape. La Minita’s succees has led to an avalanche of other coffee farms attempting to imitate its successful strategies.
The marketing of a coffee by estate is clearly of advantage to the grower because an estate coffee commands higher and more consistent prices than coffees not similarly recognized and puts the grower less at the mercy of fluctuations in supply and other exigencies. Estate coffees also offer an advantage to roasters and importers because presumably these coffees will be more consistent in their character and quality than similar coffees of more vaguely identified origin.
Nevertheless, the opportunity for abuse remains, perhaps intensifies, with estate coffees. If a grower does succeed in creating a separate identity for a coffee, and if demand for that coffee eventually exceeds the possibility of supply, why not simply buy some cheaper coffee from somewhere over the hill and ship it as your own?
Furthermore, the estate concept lends itself to substituting hype for substance and myth for reality. For every farmer who, like William McAlpin, works just as hard on making his coffee taste good as he does on publicizing it, there may be others who decide to skip the taste part and just go for the publicity.
Still, buyers who handle specialty coffee always have their noses in the air sniffing for rats, and estates that do abuse their reputations risk losing them just as rapidly as they managed to establish them in the first place. Or let us hope so.
Estate coffees tend to share the cup characteristics of the growths in the region where the estate is located. The estate coffee, if it is a good one, typically is a better, more consistent exemplar of those characteristics.
There is little way of determining through deduction alone whether a given name is a general market name or a more specific estate name, unless retailers help you out by sticking “estate” into the description somewhere, which, fortunately, they usually do. I have noted a few of the better-known estates in the discussion of coffees by country in Chapter 5.
Flavored Coffee Names
Flavored coffees are good but inexpensive coffees, roasted to a medium to medium-dark brown, and mixed with liquid flavoring agents that soak into the beans. The flavorings are a modified version of those used throughout the food industry. You occasionally may see actual bits of nuts, fruit, or spice mixed in with the beans, but these components merely dress up the mix and give it a natural look. The real flavoring is done by the added liquids. Some specialty coffee sellers refuse to carry flavored coffees for various practical and philosophical reasons, but let us assume that our hypothetical coffee store does carry them. You will immediately notice that they bear names easily identified as part of the American pop gourmet lexicon. If it sounds like a name of a candy (hazelnut creme) or a bar drink (piña colada), for example, it is a flavored coffee. Or if its name includes the words creme, vanilla, chocolate, or the name of any nut, fruit, or spice, you can be certain it is a flavored coffee. To my knowledge, the only country to appear in the flavored-coffee lexicon is Ireland, and it should not require much reflection to deduce that Irish Creme does not describe a coffee grown in Ireland. I discuss flavored coffees in detail in Chapter 5.
Surmounting the Confusion
To return to the traditional coffee lexicon, the average specialty coffee retailer’s use of terminology in labeling coffees is seldom logical or consistent, even when dealing with single-origin coffees. Ideally, we ought to be made aware of the country and region where a coffee originated, its grade, its botanical variety, its market name, when it was harvested, and the name of the farm or cooperative where it was grown and processed. Some of this information may not be known to the retailer; what is known tends to be communicated in sincere but rather arbitrary fashion.
The labels attached to coffees in signs and lists are particularly vague. We usually are given the name of the country and one or two qualifying adjectives. Some retailers may choose the most significant qualifying adjectives, others the most romantic, but the end result is still confusion. Readers of Chapter 5 should be able to manage the terminology fairly well, however, and at least be in a position to make intelligent deductions.
Coffe-Speak: A Test
To find out how capable you are of surmounting the confusion at this point, try this: Kenya. A tropical name, therefore a single-origin coffee from Kenya. Kenya AA. The qualifying adjective, AA, does not sound like a place and has a superlative ring to it, so you conclude it is a grade. Correct. Sumatra Mandheling. A tropical name, therefore a single-origin coffee from Sumatra. Since Mandheling does not sound like a grade, nor have you heard it mentioned as a botanical variety, you assume it is a market name referring to a specific coffee-growing region in Sumatra. You have deduced correctly. Mexico Altura Coatepec. Another single-origin coffee, this one from Mexico. Coatepec sounds like a regional name. Altura has the superlative ring associated with grades, and if you are at all familiar with Spanish, you know it refers to height, so you infer that it is the name of a grade based on the altitude at which the coffee is grown. Correct. Murasaki Estate Kona. Everybody knows Kona is a place in Hawaii, and Hawaii is tropical; therefore, you conclude that this is a single-origin coffee from the Kona district of Hawaii, specifically from an estate or farm called Murasaki. Sound deduction. Passion fruit. Passion fruit is definitely a tropical name, but it remains the name of a fruit and not a place, so you assume that this is a coffee of unspecified origin, roasted medium brown, and flavored with something that tastes like passion fruit. Absolutely correct. French. Coffee is not grown in France, so this must be a roast, darker than usual. Pick any prize on the lower shelf. French-Roast Mexico Oaxaca Pluma. First of all, a single-origin coffee from Mexico roasted darker than usual. Since Oaxaca is a city in Mexico, you figure (correctly) that Oaxaca refers to the region in Mexico where the coffee was grown. That leaves Pluma, which must be either a botanical variety or a grade; you guess grade and you are right. Any prize on the top shelf, including the pandas.
Traditional Blend Names
Deduction is even more in order when dealing with blended coffees. Blends, of course, are mixtures of two or more single-origin coffees. There are two basic reasons to blend beans: One is to create a coffee with a flavor that is either better and more complete than, or at least different from, the flavor produced by a single-origin coffee. The other is to cut costs while producing a palatable drink.
Nearly all commercial coffees sold preground in cans or bags are blended. Commercial roasters might want to market a pure Sumatra coffee, for instance, but they cannot count on obtaining an adequate supply of the same coffee month after month to warrant the risk of offering a name that is not immediately recognized and valued by consumers.
With many blends found in specialty coffee stores, the name gives some clue to the origin of the coffees involved. The simplest to interpret is the famous combination of Yemen Mocha and Java, the Mocha Java of tradition. Such a blend is not designed to save money but rather to combine two coffees that complement one another. Yemen Mocha is a sharp, fruity, distinctive, medium-bodied coffee, whereas Java (usually) is smoother, deeper toned, and richer. Together the two coffees make a more complete beverage than either one on its own. Although even here blend ambiguity reigns: Harrar, a similar coffee from Ethiopia, is often substituted for the Yemen in Mocha Java blends, and coffees from Sumatra may be substituted for the Java. The philosophy of the blend remains the same, however.
Other blends are named after the dominant single-origin coffee and combine an inexpensive coffee with a more costly name coffee. Thus we have Jamaica Blue Mountain blends or Hawaii Kona blends. Ideally, the characteristics of the name coffee still come through, less intensely than in a single-origin coffee, but distinctively enough. There is also a savings for the consumer (and a profit for the seller). In other cases, the blender may use lesser-known coffees to mimic the characteristics of a more famous and expensive coffee, producing Blue Mountain–style or Kona-style blends.
Another tendency in blend nomenclature might be called the generally geographical. We find a Central America blend, or a Caribbean blend. Or, we meet blends named for the time of day we presumably might drink them: Breakfast blend usually means a blend of brisk, medium-bodied coffees roasted more lightly than afterdinner blends, which generally consist of heavier-bodied, heavier-flavored coffees carried to a darker roast.
Mysteriously Named House Blends
At this point we reach the ultimate test: names for house blends, the beloved children of the proprietor or roaster, baptized with names of his or her personal fantasy. A specialty roaster may have one such child or a dozen. Some of these offspring may have been a tradition in a coffee-roasting family for two or three generations; others may have been born yesterday. A few may be unique, but most are standard blends well known in the coffee business, with slightly different proportions and fanciful names. Occasionally the name gives us a clue to content, but most often we are faced with the romance of the proprietor, whose preferences may run from mountaineering (Tip of the Andes Blend) to the elegantly British (Mayfair) to the darkly Latin (Orsi).
I harbor mixed feelings about vaguely named blends. Romance and imagination are marvelous qualities and should be encouraged, but I also think the consumer deserves to be informed in a direct and unpatronizing way. Fortunately, responsible specialty coffee roasters increasingly do offer descriptions of their blends. Although these one-liners are sometimes colored by wine label romance, they do at least name the constituent coffees, if not their proportions and precise origin.
Organic and Cause Coffees
Coffee, grown in relatively poor countries and largely consumed in richer ones, is well suited to partnerships between producers and consumers aimed at achieving a variety of ecological, economic, and social goals.
Organic coffees are certified by various international monitoring agencies as having been grown without the use of potentially harmful chemicals, thus supporting the health of consumer, producer, and environment. Shade Grown and Bird Friendly are epithets for coffees, particularly coffees from Central and South America, that are grown under canopies of native trees that provide shelter and sustenance for migrating birds. Fair-Traded coffees are purchased (usually from small holder farmers) at a “fair” price, one that should permit farmers to adequately sustain their families and their farms. This price is determined by international formula and is always higher than the typically brutally low prices paid small holders by the local market. ECO-O.K. coffees are certified by an arm of the Rainforest Alliance to meet a range of balanced environmental and economic criteria intended to assure the long-term health of both land and people. An even broader set of criteria is in process of being defined under the general term sustainable, although at this writing that term, like shade grown, is not distinguished by any mechanism for definition and certification. In other words, it currently means whatever the user wants it to mean. Finally, individual roasting companies have developed their own social and economic programs. A percentage of the retail purchase price of a given coffee may go directly to support projects that help the growers of that coffee, for example.
Such organic and cause coffees should be identified by origin and roast like any other single-origin coffee. I discuss organic and cause coffees in detail in Chapter 6 and take up related consumer health concerns in Chapter 13.
Brand Names
A few commercial-style brand names for blends or single-origin coffees are beginning to slip into the specialty-coffee lexicon. These names are catchy, evocative, always accompanied by a logo, and usually appear on well-designed bags in more sophisticated supermarkets and gourmet and natural food stores. Some have been developed in an effort to create an identity for various certified, organically grown coffees. I could say, only partly facetiously, that if a name is vague, poetic, Latin American, and comes with a good but sincere-looking logo, it is probably a brand name for an organic coffee. Some brand names try to piggyback on the fame of Jamaica Blue Mountain: Haitian Bleu is a revived, socially progressive coffee from Haiti and Blue de Brasil an organic estate coffee from—where else—Brazil.
Caffeine-Free Coffee Names
Decaffeinated, or caffeine-free, coffees have had the caffeine soaked out of them. They are sold to the roaster green, like any other coffee. Roasters in most metropolitan centers offer a variety of decaffeinated single-origin coffees, roasts, and blends. The origin of the bean and the style of the roast, when relevant, should still be designated: Decaffeinated French Roast Colombia, for instance.
The names used for the various methods of decaffeination may cause some confusion. Water-only or Swiss Water Process decaffeinated coffees have had the caffeine removed from them by first soaking the green beans in hot water, then removing the caffeine from the water by means of activated charcoal filters, then restoring the remaining chemical constituents to the green beans by reimmersing them in the same hot water.
Conventional process, traditional process, or European process all refer to methods in which the caffeine has been removed from the beans with the help of a solvent, rather than by charcoal filters. In the indirect solvent method, the solvent is used in place of charcoal filters to remove the caffeine from the hot water. The solvent never touches the beans themselves. In the direct solvent method, the solvent is directly applied to the beans, and solvent residues are removed by steaming the beans. Typically, if a process is not named for a decaffeinated coffee, it has been treated by either the direct or indirect solvent methods. If you are curious about whether a coffee has been decaffeinated by the direct or indirect method you can try asking, although most likely the clerk or order taker will not know. Solvents used in decaffeination are either methylene chloride or ethyl acetate. Ethyl acetate is derived from fruit, so you may see beans decaffeinated by processes using it described as “naturally decaffeinated” coffees.
Finally, coffees are beginning to appear that have been decaffeinated by direct treatment of the bean with a compressed, semiliquid form of carbon dioxide (CO2 process). For a detailed discussion of decaffeination processes and the health and quality issues involved, see Chapter 13.
Some Last Slipperty Terms
A few terms are particularly ambiguous: Turkish coffee refers to neither coffee from Turkey nor roast. The name designates grind of coffee and style of brewing. Turkish is a common name for a medium-to dark-roast coffee, ground to a powder, sweetened (usually), boiled, and served with a sediment still in the cup. Viennese is a slippery designation. It can mean a somewhat darker-than-normal roast or a blend of roasts (part dark and part medium) or, in Great Britain, a blend of coffee and roast fig. New Orleans coffee is usually a dark-roast coffee mixed with chicory root or a dark-roast, Brazilian-based blend without chicory.
Coffee Roasts and Coffee Flavor
Given a good-quality bean, roasting is probably the single most important factor influencing the flavor of coffee. The most significant variable is degree, or darkness, of roast. The longer coffee is held in the roaster and/or the higher the roasting temperature, the darker the bean. The darker the bean, the more tangy and bittersweet the flavor. When this flavor settles onto the uninitiated coffee drinker’s palate, the usual response is to call it strong.
However, strength in coffee properly refers to the proportion of coffee to water not the flavor of the bean. The more coffee and the less water, the stronger the brew. So you could make a light-roasted, mild-flavored coffee very strong and brew a dark-roasted, sharp-flavored coffee very weak.
I would rather call this dark-roasted flavor dark, pungent, bittersweet, or tangy. This flavor occurs in degrees, depending on how dark the bean is roasted and how the bean is roasted (quickly at high temperatures, slowly at lower, etc.). It peaks when the bean is roasted to a very dark brown and eventually vanishes entirely to be replaced by a charred, carbon taste when the bean is roasted almost black. To understand the chemistry behind the changes in taste, we need to examine what happens when a coffee bean is roasted.
Roasting Chemistry
The green coffee bean, like the other nuts, kernels, and beans we consume, is a combination of fats, proteins, fiber, and miscellaneous other substances. The aroma and flavor that make coffee so distinctive are present only potentially until the heat of roasting simultaneously forces much of the moisture out of the bean and draws out of the base matter of the bean fragrant little beads of a volatile, oily substance variously called coffee essence, coffee oil, or “coffeol.” This substance is not properly an oil, since it (fortunately) dissolves in water. It also evaporates easily, readily absorbs other less desirable flavors, and generally proves to be as fragile a substance as it is tasty. Without it, there is no coffee, only sour brown water and caffeine, yet it constitutes only 0.5 percent of the weight of the bean.
The roasted bean is, in a sense, simply a dry package for this oil. In medium- or American-roasted coffee, the oil gathers in little pockets throughout the heart of the bean. As the bean is held in the roaster for longer periods and more moisture is lost, the oil develops further and some begins to rise to the surface of the bean, giving dark roasts their characteristic lightly slick to oily appearance.
Beneath the oil, the hard matter of the bean begins to develop a slightly burned flavor while the sugars carmelize, which together help create the bittersweet tones so attractive to dark-roast aficionados. Eventually, the sugars are burned off almost entirely and the woody matter of the bean turns dry and brittle. This ultimately roasted coffee is variously called dark French, Italian, or Spanish and tastes thin and charred.
Dark roasts also contain a touch less caffeine than lighter roasts, and lack the dry snap coffee people call acidy. Some dark-roast coffees may taste unplesantly bitter, but this bitterness is the result of poor quality coffee or clumsy roasting technique. This disagreeable bitterness or sharpness should not be confused with either the dry-wine bite of a good, medium-roast, acidy coffee or the rich bittersweetness of a good dark roast.
Roast Terminology
Returning to terminology, coffee drinkers are so habitual that entire nations march from coffee initiation to grave knowing only one style of roast. This uniformity accounts for the popular terminology for describing roasts: French roast, usually the darkest; Italian roast, a little less dark; and Viennese or light French, only slightly darker than the traditional American norm.
This assigning of national names to coffee roasts is a bit arbitrary but has some basis in fact. French roasters, particularly those in parts of northern France, do roast coffee very darkly, justifying the epithet French for the very darkest roast style. And, very generally, southern Europeans roast their coffee darker than northern Europeans. I will leave the question of whether darkness of roast correlates to the relative intensity of nocturnal habits among the various nations of coffee drinkers to those who may want to consider the issue over their second cup of dark-roast coffee.
However, the “standard” roast, against which the French and Italian roasts of America are implicitly measured, varies both by region and by roaster. Berkeley-based Peet’s Coffee & Tea, which initiated the current American fashion for very dark roasting, brings all of its coffee to an extremely dark degree of roast. Consequently, the “regular” Peet’s roast is far darker than many other roasters’ French roasts. Traditionally, the American West Coast prefers a darker roast standard than the East Coast, with the Midwest appropriately somewhere between. Some of the darkest roasting in the world goes on in the American Southwest.
The success of Starbucks, with its darker-roast style, has, in part, altered this regional pattern. Many newer roasting companies, regardless of region, are now attempting to imitate the original Starbucks’s dark-roasting style. Unfortunately, many of these newcomers tend to be clumsy in their imitation, resulting in dried-out, burned coffees. Meanwhile, Starbucks itself has pulled back from its original dark-roasting position. And, being Starbucks, has come up with its own copyrighted terms for various degrees of roast as they interact with the coffees being roasted. In Starbucks-speak, 2000 edition, a traditional American medium roast is Milder Dimensions; a slightly darker roast, Lively Impressions; a moderately dark roast, Rich Traditions; and a dark roast, Bold Expressions.
The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) has gone in the opposite naming direction from the fanciful route taken by the Starbucks’s publicists. The SCAA has promulgated a straightforward, no-nonsense terminology for roast and related that terminology to objective, instrument-determined criteria for degree of roast. The SCAA terminology, which is as practical as a Volvo station wagon (and about as exciting), runs from Light Brown for the lightest roast, through Medium Brown for the middle of the range, to Very Dark Brown for the darkest, with various intermediate stages defined by inspiring terms like Light Medium Brown and Moderately Dark Brown. Despite its blunt simplicity, the SCAA system probably gives the specialty coffee buyer the clearest available set of guidelines for describing roast.
The only way to really understand roast is to associate flavor with the color and appearance of the bean rather than with name alone, but for reference I have condensed most of what an aficionado needs to know about the names of roasts in a table here.
