There is so much ambiguity around the world in terms of the language that coffee roasters use about their roast levels and quality. The latter is of course not what this one is about. In the US there is a list of common names like cinnamon, city, and full city plus. These don’t mean a whole lot to me. If we all had the same grinder and the same (agtron) colour meter, it might be a little clearer. Maybe this is an app opportunity for someone?
What I wanted to put here was a little description of how and why we roast the way that we do, starting with Filter Roast.
Filter Roast/ Filter Profile
At JGC my first love is the simple old “coffee and water” which can be done in many ways, but most of us refer to it as Filter Coffee. We call it filter coffee, even if it doesn’t physically go through a filter. This is typically lighter than espresso, where we can capture the essence of the producer’s varietal choice, terroir, and processing skills. On James Gourmet Coffee’s website, we try and split our coffees into 3 sections.
Filter Roasts/ Profile, One Roast, and Espresso. What do the others mean?
One Roast,
Most of the time, this is a coffee that is roasted in a way that works well for filter but is extractable in espresso. It can be tricky if you don’t have a great grinder, to get the best results. We have home customers that have some amazing equipment at home. You will often see different processes here that have what I call good or high soluble. I am referring to the fact that although they are light roasts they have strength in flavour, not necessarily in roast.
I prefer the term One Roast to Omni. We roast this coffee one way to do what it needs to, best, at this point in the harvest.
Espresso Profile Espresso Roast or even Traditional Espresso
This is the name we give for coffees that are roasted darker. They are easier to work with than “One Roast” and even easier to work with dairy. We usually process these in a bit more volume for our trade customers. We don’t do the whole charcoal burnt roast, to help you fill your 24oz mugs, which will need sugar, syrups, and cream to make them palatable.
Coffees that work really well with non-dairy are Simply Brazil and Vargem Grande Estate. These coffees with the lower end of the acidity scale, seem to work best. More roast doesn’t make non-dairy improve in my experience up until now!
