“Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love.”
Turkish Proverb
I've loved light roast coffee since the moment it first touched my lips. I've told this story many times; I went to a Blue Bottle and ordered a single-origin natural Ethiopia Yirgacheffe (Galana Abaya) and it blew my mind! With flavors of blueberries, jasmine, sparkling acidity, and a creamy mouthfeel, it was terrific, and I was hooked. I went on to make my life and career in coffee. I quit the pursuit of law school (my parents were horrified about that) and decided to go back to my family’s ancestral homeland, become a Q-Arabica Grader, and started importing/roasting coffee from Yemen. Like most who work in the specialty coffee industry, I believed that if people were to taste these coffees, most would throw down their “burnt” dark roast brews and begin their journey with us. That they would see the light (pun intended). As it turns out, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
In the lead-up to ‘The Monk of Mokha’ book release, my team and I set up an e-commerce-based coffee roasting company. As anticipated, we saw a massive surge of interest and traffic that directly converted to sales. What we didn’t anticipate—but in retrospect definitely should have—was that our audience was made up heavily of non-specialty coffee drinkers. We learned of this shortly after launching, when we hired a specialist to look into our audience and survey our customers. More than 80% were people who had never drank or were not familiar with specialty coffee. Despite that, they still loved us, and at the time, we took this as further confirmation that if you put this kind of coffee in front of people, they’ll see the light.
My doubts started around a year later.
I noticed it first with my friends and family. They were back to drinking darker roasted coffee. I was certain I had convinced them to convert. These are people who had been invited to my home, where we enjoyed the best coffee in the world and not just coffee from Port of Mokha and Yemen, but gems from Ethiopia, Panama, and Colombia, to name a few.
How were they back to drinking these “burnt” coffees? I received variations of the same answer back with very few exceptions; “I love your coffee, but I prefer a bolder, full-bodied coffee.” If this was what the people closest to me were saying, what did it mean for our thousands of customers?
I kept asking and inquiring about this, and not just with my friends and family. I asked chefs, hotel owners, people who work in the food space, and anyone I came across who I suspected would have a sophisticated palate; with them, it was more split. Some preferred light roast specialty style flavor profiles, and others—even though they were keenly aware of and experienced with specialty coffee—preferred the full-bodied, rich, bold profile of darker roast coffee.
It was time for me to do something. Something had to change. So, I went to my team—all of whom were/are Q-Arabica Graders—and suggested that we add to our offerings a ‘Yemen Bold.’ Their response was as you’d expect and it devolved into a full-blown argument, which had never happened before. Their main contention was that offering a dark roast coffee would diminish the brand, a point that I eventually conceded to. My team had more or less convinced me at that point, and I left the discussion alone for the time being.
But it kept nagging at me. If our audience wants it, how can we say that it diminishes our brand? Haven’t we learned this in business by now? Haven’t we learned that the elitist approach never performs as well as listening to your customers? I returned to my team, and we agreed to do surveys to determine whether this “Yemen Bold” offering was a good idea.
Our test was simple. We roasted our coffee at two different roast profiles. One was our standard profile, and the other was darker. We had these two roasts packaged into a pour-over pouch and then sent it to customers. We asked them to brew both of them at the same time, taste both of them and then report back to us what each of them tasted like and which one they preferred.
The results spoke for themselves. More than 65% of the people who tasted both coffees preferred the darker roast. These were repeat customers of ours who had only tasted bright, fruit-forward Yemeni coffee. Yet many preferred the darker roast's chocolate, caramel, and bold profile. So, we began offering a Yemen bold and haven’t looked back. People who like darker roasts will be excited to hear that we have more bold offerings slated for release in 2023.
We use an analogy in specialty coffee, which I've used frequently, of a medium rare steak vs. a well-done steak. I stopped using it a while ago and see it now as a poor comparison. I consider myself a steak lover and have been one for a long time. If you’re a steak lover, you know this, most people do not want a medium rare (correctly cooked) steak. I've often found myself, as many others have, convincing my friends and family to try my medium-rare steak when I go out with them. When I tell you that not a single one has ever returned to eating well-done steak on any occasion, I mean not a solitary one of them. The coffee-steak analogy just doesn’t apply in my estimation.
Coffee is the most chemically complex thing humans consume, and what happens during the roasting process further deepens that complexity. It’s not like a burnt steak; it is not objectively better for coffee to be roasted light. It’s complicated, and people’s preference is not simply due to lack of exposure or unsophisticated palates. We need to begin to take this to heart in specialty coffee.
Who we harm…
I remember walking into a specialty coffee shop on Valencia Street in San Francisco early in my coffee journey. For San Francisco natives like myself, Valencia Street is the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about gentrification in SF. When I walked into this shop, I had just gotten into specialty and was full of excitement and curiosity at this newfound world/passion. By the time I left, I was convinced that I had no place in the specialty world. I was greeted with such pretension, suspicion, and poor service that I honestly was ready to move on to something else and end my pursuit of coffee. By the grace of God, I didn’t, as I met incredible and fundamentally unpretentious mentors like James Freeman and Willem Boot. But there was a moment there when I almost quit.
This whole dark roast saga reminded me of that coffee shop experience, and also got me thinking about who is harmed and who ultimately benefits from us digging in our feet with light-roast coffee.
Naturally, the first people that come to my mind are the producers. Specialty coffee has revolutionized the coffee industry and, at the very least, begun the hard work of undoing some of our industry’s colonial legacy. When we alienate this massive audience of dark roast coffee drinkers, we cut those potential customers off from the farmer. We hurt ourselves, definitely, but we also hurt them. They don’t care how we roast our coffee; they care that people are buying it from us, and in turn, we are buying it from them. How do you think it makes them feel when we actively alienate such a massive segment of the coffee-drinking public?
And who benefits? Commodity coffee benefits. Because, for the most part, they’re the only shop in town. Why can’t we hit them where it hurts? Why can’t we extract dark roast drinkers with a superior, more ethical product? I think we can.
There are already a handful of specialty coffee establishments that offer darker roasts. But it’s almost always a blend and almost always their past crop. They don’t want to sully their higher-quality coffees with a dark roast. Why? Don’t tell me people won’t taste the difference. They absolutely, unequivocally do and will.
And yes, many of the reasons commodity coffee companies roast super dark is to hide defects in low-grade coffee. But both can be true at the same time. People can genuinely love darker roasts, while businesses utilize the technique for commercial gain at the expense of quality.
What I sincerely believe is that there is an almost cult-like zealotry that is keeping us from tapping this massive market. We have decided not to pursue dark roast drinkers because we actually believe our subjective preference is somehow enlightened and superior. It’s the same attitude that frequently alienates people walking through our doors. The same attitude that came a hair close to turning me off from specialty coffee forever.
What now?
There are logistical and business challenges with offering more than one roast profile. And definitely, for many smaller roasters, it just doesn’t make sense. There’s also the argument regarding brand and whether offering these darker roasts will somehow hurt a company's reputation among its audience. I think this is largely an unfounded assumption. The roasters I’m friends with who have started offering bolder roasts in addition to their lighter ones have noticed virtually no difference in how their existing audience interacts with them. The added offering only increases their reach and even, at times, gives their existing customers something they appreciate.
My recommendation for roasters looking to make the jump is to start small and work your way up. At the very least, have something ready for walk-in customers who might not like “sour” coffee and would prefer that it taste “black as hell, strong as death, and sweet as love."
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