Coffee strength 101: Is your coffee too flavory or not flavory enough?

Posted on Tue, Oct 5, 2010 : 12:29 p.m.

Coffee strength 101: Is your coffee too flavory or not flavory enough?

By John Roos

Light passing through different strengths of coffee.

Roos

Coffee strength (which you can usually measure by how much light will pass through it) depends on the ratio of water to coffee used to make the brew.Â

Weak coffee or "over extracted" coffee would be coffee with too much water. That is typically the case in most brewed coffee. Coffee that is too strong or "over extracted" has too much coffee for the amount of water. It's important to get this ratio just right so the optimal extraction can occur.

Factors such as freshness, water quality, grind, water temperature and brew time also affect the taste. No matter what you do, if the coffee isn't freshly roasted or if the water is nasty, you're going to get nasty coffee. But then again that may be your thing. You may be that person that loves tire store coffee because it tastes like what you love about car tires. (Maybe it's that slow cooking glass pot on the coffee warmer reduction taste).

But regardless, you can make dark roast coffee weak and light roast coffee strong, depending on how you brew it, the grind, etc. So when people are asking which beans to buy and tell me they don't like strong coffee, I just tell them, "don't make it strong then!"

I will add that over-roasted coffee, which I don't sell at RoosRoast, will actually be weak no matter how you brew it because the flavor has been "cooked" out.

I remember when I first started roasting coffee I would roast it really dark because I thought that's what I liked (3rd crack). I would take it into the Subaru dealership where I sold cars and put way too much coffee in the brew basket and make a pot and, guess what? It would taste weak! I couldn't understand it — how could tons of dark roast coffee produce so little taste? Well, I had essentially roasted the beans into little beads of charcoal. The coffee tasted like hot burned filtered water but of a coffee nature. In other words, the coffee was under extracted.

So the bottom line is, light or dark, how strong coffee tastes will depend on how much coffee you use per cup and how you make it. To use a phrase from my friend Shana at ShanaLogic, "too flavory" or "not flavory enough" — that's up to you!

John Roos owns RoosRoast coffee company in Ann Arbor.

Light passing through different strengths of coffee

Comments

actionjackson

Wed, Oct 6, 2010 : 8:32 a.m.

Keep up the fine work John. You do a mighty fine job these days. I remember when you were still roasting in the old Almendinger neighborhood.