Maybe I Was Wrong About Light Roast

Hey,

I think I've been looking at light roast all wrong.

For the longest time my complaint was simple. Light roast tastes like tea. And I don't really like tea, so I wrote it off. But lately I've been thinking, what if that's not the problem. What if that's the starting point. So I did something a little strange. I brewed a very lightly roasted Colombian right next to an actual cup of rooibos tea, and I tasted them back to back.

And you know what? The coffee really does taste like tea. Floral and light, with an acidity that sits right up front and a body so thin it never quite settles onto your tongue. It's right there. But instead of that being the end of the conversation, I let it be the beginning.

If light roast is already sitting in tea territory, then the question isn't how do I make this taste like my medium roast. It can't, and it won't. The question is how do I make it more interesting than the tea. And the answer is extraction. I pushed it. Finer grind, a longer draw, a 1 to 18 ratio, chasing a higher extraction than I'd normally go for. The cup got more complex, more layered, without tipping into bitterness.

I'm a medium and dark roast guy. Chocolate, body, sweetness, that's my comfort zone. So light roast has always felt like a language I don't speak. But when I stopped asking it to be something it isn't, and started treating it like a tea I could push and shape, it finally opened up.

This isn't me telling you light roast is my favorite now. It's not. And if you already love your medium and dark and never want to touch light roast, keep doing exactly what you're doing. You're not missing some mandatory experience.

But if light roast has always frustrated you, if it's tasted like weak, sour, expensive tea, try flipping the frame. Lean into the tea. Then push the extraction and see how far you can take it. That one change in how I think about it did more for me than any recipe tweak.

Watch me brew the coffee and the tea side by side here. Then hit reply and tell me, do you already treat light roast like tea, or does it still fight you? I read every response.

Oaks, the Coffee Guy