Condé Nast’s Coffee Drinking Guide
Posted by TheShot on 24 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Roasting, Robusta
Today Condé Nast posted an general consumer article on what to look for in good coffee: Coffee Drinking Guide - Portfolio.com. However, it reads more as a quick guide to following what’s “trendy” today — rather than as a guide to seeking good quality coffee experiences. (Not to mention that the article’s title, “Eat Sheet: Coffee,” takes on a whole other meaning with a Middle Eastern coffee grower’s accent.)
For example, the pro-”light roast” movement is really just the flavor du jour. And after so many years of over-roasted and darkly roasted coffee, who can blame anyone? But as much as we tire of the ubiquitous wine analogy for coffee, the recent focus on light roasts isn’t far off from all the people who are now drinking rosé wines again.
Once people get it out of their system, they’ll be interested in darker roasts again. Just as when they get off single origin and single estate coffees, they’ll come to appreciate well-crafted coffee blends again — and the merits of high quality robusta beans again. And just as we explore enough with Clover machines and vacuum pots, something like espresso becomes interesting again. Each has their merits, and there never has been one way to appreciate good coffee.
For example, it’s true that lighter roasts exhibit better characteristics of certain beans. But for other bean varietals — such as those from Indonesian estates in Java and Sulawesi — a lighter roast is no better than darkly roasting a delicate island coffee: instead of the great body and lower acidity inherent to these beans, they come out tasting thin, bland, and even a little grassy at times.
Coffee is often best roasted to maximize the best, most unique qualities in the bean — and no bean is the same, really. And there is no one way to appreciate it all.
2 Comments »
on 27 Jun 2008 at 9:35 am -05:00T 1.ManSeekingCoffee said …
Just to be clear - and I think this is what you mean - by darker roast you mean something like Blue Bottle vs. Ritual and not Peet’s vs. Ritual, right? Darker, not burnt. And of course the old mantra about the right roast for the right coffee. But you’re right, the current trend does have a kind of Hegelian extremes vibe to it. Now we just have to swing back and find the Aristotelian virtuous mean.
on 27 Jun 2008 at 1:41 pm -05:00T 2.TheShot said …
“Darker roasts” as ones that actually dare go into the second crack. I don’t associate darker roasts with a specific coffee roaster (though some roasters, such as Ritual, willingly do), a specific varietal, etc.
Now “burnt” would be “darker”, but way darker on the kind of spectrum I’m thinking about!
There’s just so much “anti-dark roast” blather out there right now, it strikes me as just another flavor of the very single-mindedness they are reacting against. From day one when Ritual Roasters said, with pride, that they only did “medium roasts”, I thought they were merely replacing one myopic, one-dimensional treatment for another.
That’s not progress; that’s just moving the same blind spots around from one corner to another.