Don't Buy Your Coffee By The Roast, Do This Instead For The Best Brew

If you take one piece of advice when choosing between light, medium, or dark roast coffee it should be this: Don't sweat it. There are tons of different types of coffee roasting levels, but even if you stick to the classics you're most likely to see at the grocery store, roast levels can be confusing. Yeah you get that light is not roasted as much as dark, but how much does that actually affect the flavor? Not as much as you think.

While roast level does affect the flavor there are other characteristics, like the growing region the coffee came from or the quality of the roaster, that affect the taste just as much. On top of that there is no actual standard for what each level means, so one brand's medium roast may actually be darker than another's dark roast. So to help us sort through this we asked a coffee expert, Andrea Allen, the co-founder of Onyx Coffee Lab, and the 2020 U.S. Barista Champ and 2021 World Barista Runner-Up, about what you should be looking at when picking your coffee.

"My suggestion would be to purchase from a roaster that roasts the coffee to its potential, not to a roast profile," Allen says. "This will allow for the natural characteristics of the green coffee to shine through." And finding a roaster that brings out a coffee's full potential means understanding the characteristics of different coffee beans.

Using different levels of heat and time, roasters can manipulate the flavors in coffee, no matter the beans. This means they can choose to make the final product more or less acidic, fruity, etc. Roasting a bean to its potential, as Allen recommends, means utilizing those techniques to bring out more of the notes inherent in different coffee beans. A lot of those tasting notes you hear about, like chocolatey or nutty, come from the beans' origins. A Brazilian light roast is not going to taste anything like a light roast from Vietnam.

That's why it pays to know how coffee growing regions differ. Ethiopian coffee, for example, is known for bright, acidic brews, while Central America is known for more smooth, sweet notes. "If you know the origin of coffee you enjoy, such as Ethiopia or Colombia," Allen notes, "you can shop from notable roasters within those categories."

However the variety of regions and origins can be overwhelming for coffee newbies. "If you are buying for the first time I'd suggest buying something that is from your favorite coffee bar, so you can learn from the baristas and so that you're familiar with the flavor profiles," she recommends. "Then you can go from there." Anyone will eventually learn the nuances of coffee to find their favorite coffee brands, but it always helps to find a guide at the start of your journey.