Interpreting Roast Levels

I know this might be a hot take among my fellow roasters but this is my experience and how I interpret roasts from other roasters. Roast levels are pretty subjective and it will 100% vary from roaster to roaster. There is no unified roast levels anywhere. I mean there is Agtron but not many people are going to understand that. For example, my dark roast is lighter than a Starbuck’s blonde roast! Crazy right?

In my eyes, there are 3 (actually 4) general roast descriptors. These are Floral/Fruit, Sweetness, and Chocolate/Nut. Now what should you expect from these flavors? Coffees from Lotus will usually have 1 flavor note for each of these descriptors and depending on what kind of roast you choose, it’ll lean more into a particular descriptor.

Light Roasts are Flavor Adventure

For light roasts, you should expect high fruit or floral notes in your cup.

The fruit is pretty straight forward but floral can be orange blossom or jasmine and even sometimes tea like qualities.

There should still be some sweetness as there is some caramelization of the sugar built during Maillard reaction. But there should be very little chocolate or nuttiness to the coffee.

Medium Roasts are the Golden Child

Now with Medium roasts, you’re getting the best of both worlds. Usually expect the coffee to focus more on sweetness while still retaining some floral or fruitiness. It should also start incorporating more chocolate or nuttiness to it.

Now what is sweetness? It’ll be notes like brown sugar, toffee, caramel, Maple syrup, and Molasses.

Dark Roasts are a Classic

This is for those that grew up on the super roasted, dark, and oily coffees. While I don’t take my roasts that far, my goal is so that someone who enjoys that kind of roast will appreciate a specialty coffee roasted to what I think is dark and think it’s a great cup.

You’ll be getting lots of chocolate and nuttiness with some sweetness but we’ve all but lost that fruit or floral notes. Chocolate can be dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or cacao, While I’ve had macadamia nuts, almond, pecan, hazelnuts, or even pistachios as flavor notes.

If you’ve made it this far, you must be thinking, didn’t he say there was a fourth descriptor? And you’re right, there is a fourth descriptor! That wonderful descriptor is the “roast”. Now what is the “roast”? It’s that burnt, ashy, or roasty flavor note that you might find in your coffee. This is more prevalent is roasts that are past second crack (what is second crack? That’s a blog post for another time). Dark roasts from us are right before or right when I hear one crack from second crack. I don’t want that roasty taste.

I hope this is somewhat helpful to anyone learning or trying new coffees. Until next time, enjoy your cup of coffee!