What a Light Roast Coffee Should Be

hi welcome back to our YouTube videos we took a little bit of a 6 month hiatus from making these videos but now we should have a plan to have a pretty good rhythm to get one or two out a month maybe three this first series I wanted to talk a little bit about what our coffee roast levels are I think there's a lot of misinformation or just assumptions about what a light dark and medium coffee roast is and so I want to go through that talk a little bit about what a light roast is for sagebrush coffee in this video and then in coming videos we'll talk more about a medium and a dark roast before I get into the light roast exactly I want to talk about how coffee roasting works a little bit we have another video that talks completely about coffee roasting and that we'll get into a little bit more detail than what I want to go over but right now I just wanted to talk about coffee roasting at a high level so when you're roasting coffee there's a lot of science around it we actually have a software program that gets us a lot of the way there but you also use really primarily three of your senses in roasting coffee you use sound sight and smell and the sound is really important as we talked a little bit about the level of roasts and that goes back to the misinformation a light roast coffee is not necessarily based on color but it's based off of where it falls within the roasting cycle and what you're hearing in that roasting cycle kind of the same with the dark roast coffee light medium and dark roast coffee I'll give you different flavor profiles but they're more related to where they fall within the roasting cycle versus where they are color wise speaking of that but you've got this roasting cycle where you've got a curve where you're just applying a ton of heat early to try to get the the coffee beans heated up and once you hit a certain area within the roasting cycle you start to get a carmelization of the beans and in that caramelization the outer layer of the bean itself starts to become less dense and it starts to break down and when it breaks down you get what is commonly referred to among Coffee Roasters as the first crack and that first crack is actually a popping sound that sounds like popcorn popping on your stove and that's air being released because that outer shell is broken down in that first crack that is really where a light roast coffee is is because that you've gone through the Maillard reaction you've started to caramelize the beans the outer shell is started to break down and it starts popping like popcorn what I like to do for light roasts is usually stop the roast kind of 2/3 of the way or almost all the way through that first crack but still while you're hearing the popping of the first crack and I think that gives you kind of some of the light roast characteristics this isn't a blog post to talk about coffee processing but as you hear about coffee processing you'll see on the website all over the place we talked about dry process or wet process or honey processed coffee beans dry we use interchangeably dry or natural and washed or wet and then there's honey and you can even hear semi wash all of those processes have an effect on how that first crack sounds and some of the things you're going to see during the light roast coffee if you have a wet process coffee or a washed coffee you're actually going to see a white stripe down the middle of the coffee bean and that will indicate that it's a lighter roast and the brighter white that is the lighter the roast it is that doesn't exist at all in a dry process coffee because of the way the coffee beans processed and you get a similar thing kind of in between for the semi wash to the hunting process coffees when you look at these different coffee processing methods each processing method has different characteristics and flavor profiles and a light roast is affected by that a lot first I want to talk about dry processed coffees and what they taste like as a light roast in general a dry process coffee is processed with the fruit on the pit itself and so the coffee bean is the pit of a cherry and those are put on drying beds with that fruit still on there and so logically a dry process coffee is going to taste more fruity the lighter you roast it the more that fruit is going to stand out on a dry process coffee if you buy from sage rush coffee a dry process regardless of origin a dry process coffee roasted light expect it to taste fruity it's going to be extra fruity and when I even decide what the roasting profile is if I taste a dry process coffee and it tastes incredibly fruity I'm probably gonna choose to make that a light roast coffee just so that it becomes really strongly fruited and has that for the people that love fruity coffees if you don't like fruity coffee steer clear of a dry process coffee that's roasted light you're never gonna like those and then wash coffees are wet processed coffees that is what the vast majority of coffee is out there almost anything you buy at a store is washed it's very typical and so when you're looking at what the origin of that coffee tastes like you're gonna probably taste that more in a washed coffee or a wet process coffee a Colombian coffee is going to be more nutty and creamy with a milk chocolate undertone and Ethiopians probably gonna be more floral and complex with a little bit of fruit and some other things going on in it Sumatran coffees that are light roasts are gonna be super earthy and taste a lot almost like the ground that they come from you're gonna get a lot of that flavor of origin and a light process washed you don't get any of the the fruit you don't get any of the other notes to it in a wash coffee which I don't pick light roast for a lot of washed coffees because a lot of times it almost tastes a little bit too much like the origin and I want to try to draw some other things out but if you have a light roasted wash coffee you're really going to get the complexity of what that origin has to offer and then as you've probably guessed because it's semi wash or honey process that is kind of an in-between in the honey process you actually take the skin of the cherry off and process it with just the Musil edge and so it gets that like honey sticky feeling before it gets cleaned and so that generally makes a sweeter cup of coffee a light roasted hunting process which you probably pretty rarely see that on sage Russia site because it's just not my favorite and I usually sell things I like but a light process honey roasted coffee is going to be super sweet and that's just it's the sweetness of it it's going to stand out and so in summary when you see a light roasted coffee on Sage rush coffees website you're not looking for the color of the coffee but we're more thinking about where it falls within the roasting process and some of the flavor emphases that are going to come out of that and those are going to be a more brighter a more fruity cup of coffee and a little bit less of the deep chocolates that you might get from a darker roasted it's going to take on more of the flavor the origin and so that that's pretty much it for light roasted stay tuned in a couple of weeks we'll launch another blog post that talks about medium roasted coffee [Music]

Channel: Sagebrush Coffee

Views: 9,211

Keywords: coffee, coffeeshop, light roast coffee, coffee roasting, coffee education, sagebrush coffee, education, coffee teaching, coffee learning, roasting coffee, coffee roast, coffee light roast

Id: mC2J5hgh6B4

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 25 2020