

Medium Roast Coffee At A GlanceĬolour: Dark Brown, Rarely Oils Dark Roasts This makes them, in the eyes of many, the best roast level for newcomers to specialty coffee. They can be exotic, but they’re generally a little more balanced and approachable. There’s still an incredible amount of flavour diversity among medium roasts. Rich, smooth aromas are formed and a pleasant hint of bitterness arrives to round out the brighter notes. With medium roasts, the most intense acids are toned down and smoothed out by a forming sweetness that’s often reminiscent of caramel, honey, or molasses. The beans are usually a light brown colour and rarely have an oily sheen (though it happens every now and then).Ĭoffees roasted to this level still have most of the flavours unique to their origin farm or country, but they’re wrapped together in a more approachable, and often more balanced, flavour experience. Modern medium roasts are also lighter than the medium roasts of a few decades ago. If you’re willing to fight through some potential inconsistencies for the diverse flavour profiles, light roasts may be a great fit for you. This can make them irritating to coffee lovers who just want a delicious cup that they can rely on for weeks or months.

Sometimes two different bags of the same coffee can require different brewing techniques to get the same result. Light roast beans are the least broken down and have the most variation.

However, this incredible flavour diversity comes with a price: inconsistency. There’s a lot of variation capable with light roasts. On the other hand, beans from Ethiopia often have rich notes of blueberries or strawberries. Panamanian beans tend to be extremely floral with a citrus tang. You can pay upwards of $25 a pound or more for great coffee, but you can find perfectly good coffee for much less at the supermarket – it just may not be as complex or balanced.Light roast coffees from Guatemala often have a crisp apple-like acidity and light milk chocolate flavour. It’s often easier to tell where more expensive, higher-quality beans came from based on flavor profile – e.g. ✔️ Price: A more expensive bean (in terms of per-pound cost) will generally have more attention paid to each individual step of production: growing, harvesting, roasting, etc. With larger commodity roasters, you’ll typically only have a “best-by” date: This doesn’t tell you much about freshness, only that it’s still okay to drink (coffee is technically safe to drink for a very, very long time - smell and taste are better indications of when a bag has gone bad). If you’re buying from a specialty roaster, there’s a good chance you’ll find a roast date on the bag.

✔️ Roast Date: More recent roast date = fresher coffee. Dark-roasted beans also go stale more quickly, so it’s extra important to drink them fresh. Medium-roasted beans fall somewhere in between. Light roasted beans tend to be sweeter with a balanced acidity, whereas dark roast is often bolder and less acidic. ✔️ Roast Type: Specialty roasters usually default to light roast because it shows off more of the bean’s inherant characteristics.
