Close your eyes, and imagine taking a sip of thick espresso. What flavours would you hope are dancing on your tongue? Dark chocolate? Caramel?
How about lemon? What if the coffee is so acidic, you may as well be sucking on lemon juice? This acidity is often the result of roasting a coffee quite lightly, and specialty coffee loves this acidity.
But the weird thing is specialty coffee isn't obsessed with acidity because they necessarily enjoy acidic flavours. It goes waaaaaay deeper. So deep in fact it's caused massive Twitter brawls where a celebrity food columnist even sparred with a gang of self-proclaimed coffee punks.
Scott takes Jools on a coffee roasting journey, starting at the darker times in coffee, and how it evolved into the light roasts of today by speaking with Sonja Bjork Grant (Icelandic roaster and World Barista Judge) and Nick Mabey (co-owner of Assembly Coffee Roasters).
At the end, we ask the question: were the coffee punks right to be so focused on lightly roasted coffee?
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Jools Walker: Welcome to Adventures in Coffee, a podcast by Caffeine Magazine about the mysterious and myth-laden world of coffee, brought to you by Siemens Home Appliances and the IKAWA Home.
Scott Bentley: Yes, we journey around the globe so you, dear listener, can have a coffee adventure in your very own kitchen.
Jools Walker: Now, I'm Jooles Walker, also known as Lady Velo. I am a best-selling cycling author from east London and your very everyday coffee lover.
Scott Bentley: And I'm Scott Bentley, the founder of Caffeine Magazine, coffee myth killer, and funky coffee freak.
Jools Walker: So, Scott today, there's a bit of a change of scene. I'm actually in your kitchen right now, staring at your dog and you, of course. I'm not here just for the dog, honestly, but you've promised it to pamper me for the day. Haven't you with coffees in a cracking story?
Scott Bentley: Absolutely. I'm hoping you're enjoying the hospitality of Chez Bentley.
And…but yes, I have got a bit of a story for you.
This is a story about coffee roasting and why everyone keeps going on and on about the amazingness of light roasted coffee.
Jools Walker: It's true. I kind of feel like dark roast is a bit of a filthy word when I say it in front of you and it kind of gives me the fear.
Scott Bentley: No, I hear ya and I apologize for that. So I'm going to try and take you on a journey to show you what it was like, you know, back in the… let's say the dark old days of coffee, when everyone kind of saw the light and I'm using big air quotes here “saw the light.” And when everyone jumped onto this light roast bandwagon and why, you know, maybe we got a bit carried away.
Jools Walker: A bit.
Scott Bentley: Well, anyway, strap in Jools, because we're going to be seeing this through the eyes of celebrity food columnists. We're going to see some sparring with some of the biggest figures in specialty coffee, massive Twitter brawls, and a gang of self-proclaimed coffee punks.
Okay. I'm, ready for this, but I want to know Scott at the end of all of this, how is this going to actually change my coffee journey?
Scott Bentley: Well maybe, Jools, the next time a coffee snob wants to get all judgey on you for liking a little bit of the dark stuff, you'd have somebody to come back with.
Jools Walker: Scott, this sounds super intriguing, but before we get to that point, let's have a quick word from our sponsors.
Can latte lover Jools, myself, roast coffee like an expert on the Ikawa Home?
Scott Bentley: Jools, I am dying to know. Tell me more, please.
Jools Walker: All right, love. The other day, I roasted up a coffee from the Peralta family in Nicaragua on the Ikawa Home. Now, I played with the settings on the smartphone app and I've roasted up a couple of different batches and decided that a medium light roast degree tasted the best. And then I popped it in a little bag and shipped it to this marvelous man.
Jakub: Hi, my name is Jakub Klucznik, at the moment I work for Saint Espresso. I am a Barista Lead.
Jools Walker: Jakub, how long have you worked in the coffee industry?
Jakub: It's been on and off for like last 13 years.
Jools Walker: How many roasters or different coffees, do you think you've tried?
Jakub: Countless. Weekly, I try four or five different roasters, five different bags.
Jools Walker: And then Scott, Jakub brewed up my medium light. Roast.
Jakub: Now I have like some fruity, floral notes. Mmm… tempting me to drink it.
Jools Walker: And then he put it to his lips.
Jakub: Well, I would say that's one of the nicest Nicaraguas I had the pleasure to try this year. Definitely a top five.
Jools Walker: Do you have any ideas who may have roasted this coffee?
Jakub: I would say it's rather, an air bed roaster, and not a drum roaster.
Scott Bentley: Man. He's got that prey well. I mean, yeah, the Ikawa is a fluid air bed roaster.
And then Scott, I did the big reveal.
It was roasted by me!
Jakub: Great job! I’m really impressed!
Jools Walker: Thank you so much. Thank you!
Scott Bentley: Jools, you’re making a bit of a habit of this, you need to get into roasting.
Jools Walker: Now, if you want to follow Jakub and Saint Espresso on Instagram, we've linked them in the show notes.
Scott Bentley: So dear listener, roast coffee your way, with the Ikawa Home.
So, Jools look, to kick us off, do you remember a food columnist under the name of Jay Rayner, by any chance?
Jools Walker: Oh yeah. He writes for a bunch of British newspapers and I see him and we all do every now and then on TV on shows like Master Chef.
Scott Bentley: Yeah. Well, how can I say this? He dropped a bombshell on the coffee community in 2014. Now, I'm just going to read it because you know, whatever you think about Jay Rayner, what you can't say is he's not an incredible writer. So I'm just going to read this verbatim.
Jools Walker: Okay.
Scott Bentley: It's September, 2012 and I'm sitting in a restaurant on London's Kings Road, staring unhappily at an espresso.
The color is right, is coal black and across the surface is a fine seashore foam of copper colored froth. The all-in potent crema, the taste, however is wrong. Very, very wrong. It's fiercely acidic, a sour hit that makes my lips pucker up like a cat spam. I wanted the familiar, dark, bitter chocolate caramel tones.
And I got something akin to lemon juice. Over the next few months, the same thing keeps happening in restaurants and cafes. I order an espresso. I'm served with a cup of something sharp and unpleasant.
Jools Walker: Damn. It sounds like Jay's not having a great time with his coffees, man. Doesn't sound fun.
Scott Bentley: So what's happening is that essentially Jay likes his traditional Italian espresso. But the thing is all the hips, the cafes are serving him this new, exciting brew, and it's called specialty coffee.
So Jools, I think what I'm going to try and do now is see if I can take you back there. Back to the days of lemon juice, espressos.
So Jools, I've roasted you up a coffee in two different ways. I've done one as a really light roast, something that was probably served to Jay at the time, and something, which is a very dark roast, which is probably what he was expecting.
Here you go. Taste the coffees. Tell me what you think.
Jools Walker: Okay. So the dark one, kind of feels like it's coating my mouth for starters. So it's like a sort of heavy, dark, almost kind of bitter chocolaty taste. So, I'll be naughty and say that I probably would put some sugar in that.
All right. I'm going to try the lighter one now.
Scott Bentley: Oh Jools, I think something akin to a cat’s bum.
Jools Walker: Yeah, you're just sensing that…you know, what Jay was saying, it's a shot of lemon in my mouth.
It’s not awful, but that’s not what I would know traditional espresso to be.
Scott Bentley: So Jools, I'm going to take you back again to this article. You know, Jay really leaned into this real skepticism of specialty coffee. And there is this moment that he describes when he's on the London Coffee Festival Tour Bus, and James Hoffman makes him an espresso.
Now, many of you will know James Hoffman as a YouTuber, but in the past he's been a World Barista Champion and he's the co-founder of Square Mile Coffee Roasters, one of the first coffee roasters in London, really going in hard on this sort of third wave thing. And this is what Jay says about that experience:
He serves me a cup of something from Ethiopia. He talks about the bergamot qualities and it does indeed tastes a bit like Earl Grey tea. I mutter, that if I wanted something that tasted like Earl Grey tea, I would have probably just ordered a cup of Earl Grey tea.
Jools Walker: Okay. Fair enough. If you like it dark, drink it dark.
Scott Bentley: Yeah. Look, I think the most interesting thing for me is, you know, quite how the specialty coffee community reacted. I mean, it escalated big time on Twitter. Unfortunately, look, and I wasn't a part of that, but I think that it's one of the reasons why Jay politely declined to come on the podcast, don't get me wrong.
You know, I was really annoyed back then. And I remember having conversations with other people in the community, where people felt like Jay, wasn't looking at the bigger picture.
Jools Walker: Scott, I'm going to be honest with you. I kind of don't get this. I mean, we're talking about a lightly roasted sort of citrusy, fruity coffee versus a dark roasted chocolaty coffee. I'm a fan on occasion of like a traditional, you know, dark roasted Italian espresso. But what I don't get is what was so wrong with it? Why was the, you know, that part of the coffee industry, so adverse to that?
Scott Bentley: Jools, I think to maybe explain why the specialty community did get so offended by this and maybe why they took it a bit too far, I need to take you further back in time.
I want to take us back to the dark old days of coffee. And I don't just mean from a roast perspective, I want to take us way, way back to a very dark and cold country. It’s winter, is Iceland. It's the mid nineties, queue lightning, cue the rain, cue the snow.
Jools Walker: The same… oh my goodness.
Scott Bentley: But, anyway. In Iceland, in the mid nineties, there was this wonderful human being.
Sonja Bjork Grant: My Name is Sonia Bjork Grant and I am from Iceland, born and raised in a small town called Akureyri. I started in coffee when I was so lucky to be hired in a specialty coffee roastery in Iceland.
Scott Bentley: So, just to give you some context, Sonja is today a World Barista Judge. She's a trainer, a roaster, and she's seen the specialty scene evolve over the last 25 years, which is kind of why I wanted to speak to her.
So when you started first in coffee in 1995, what was the landscape like then in Iceland? What was the prevailing coffee that was being purchased and drunk?
Sonja Bjork Grant: Well, in Iceland, first of all, everybody used blends, they needed to have sugar in their coffee because still we were roasting very dark.
Scott Bentley: So, that's kinda what I wanted to get to was, at the time, even the roastery you're working in and most people were roasting their coffee relatively darker? Is that right?
Sonja Bjork Grant: Yeah. Of course not as much as in Europe, you know, like in Italy and Spain. We were looking at their coffee and we were like… Oh my God, how is it possible to drink this? But we were still dark, when I look back, I'm like, how could we even drink this? The first flavor was always the roast. It was never the character of the coffee, at that time.
Jools Walker: Okay, Scott, this is interesting because it actually reminds me of our episode that we did with Francois Knopes of Perky Blenders. So, you know, the “Single Origin Coffees Fairytale, Debunked” with him and his grandfather and father who were all roasting coffee in Belgium, decades ago.
Now, if I remember correctly, back then the pre-roasted green coffee itself was rather generic. So each roaster had to differentiate themselves somehow from every other coffee roaster by creating blends.
Scott Bentley: That's right. And Here's the interesting thing. Specialty coffee or good coffee back in the mid two thousands was also pretty dark. I mean, across the world, for example, I spoke with this guy.
Nick Mabey: My name's Nick Mabey. I am the director of a coffee roastery in London called Assembly Coffee.
Scott Bentley: When did you actually start in coffee?
Nick Mabey: I pick that to 2007 when I started being a barista at a kind of, prolific cafe operation in Wellington, New Zealand.
Scott Bentley: Nick told me at that time, what he was looking for in espresso.
Back then, what did coffee taste like?
Nick Mabey: I remember distinctly understanding good espresso shots to be all textually focused. And obviously it couldn't taste sour, and it couldn't taste bitter. It had to taste somewhere in between and you would have to say that it was categorically, dark.
Jools Walker: Ahh, so even specialty coffee was dark roasted in the mid two thousands.
Scott Bentley: Yes, these blends were all dark roasted because I mean…Sonja will explain.
Sonja Bjork Grant: Everything was looking for consistency. Not only in coffee, but it was everything, like making instruments, all kinds of industry. Everybody was looking for consistency, it was the same with coffee.
Jools Walker: Okay. But what does Sonja mean by consistency? I want to know how roasting darker led to more consistency?
Scott Bentley: Let's think about Starbucks. Okay. You going to London, you buy a cup of coffee from Starbucks and you get a certain flavor. And then you're in America.You're in Rio. You're in Berlin. You walk into a Starbucks, the coffee tastes the same. So wherever you go, like a McDonald's hamburger, is always the same.
And the thing with Starbucks is, to get this consistency, you just have to roast pretty hard, pretty dark. And then what you're tasting throughout everything is just the roast, the dark roast itself. You're not really tasting the origin of the bean. And I'm going to show you now why that is.
I'm going to present you with two coffees here. These are darkly roasted coffees. One of them's an Ethiopian and one of them is a Nicaraguan. And I want to get an idea from you, how different they taste. These are different coffees from different origins.
Jools Walker: Uh! This is interesting, tasting this, Scott. I mean, I've definitely tasted coffees that were like super different to each other in every way. Like there were no similarities at all in flavors. Just some of them were completely off the charts on one another. It was just like a real sort of like polar opposites.
But with these two that you've given to me, Scott, I'm getting really strong sort of chocolatey flavors and some, some bitter notes. But the other interesting thing with these two coffees, Scott, is that, there are more similarities going on then differences between them.
Scott Bentley: And look, if you're roasting thousands and thousands of tons of coffee all over the world, like what Starbucks does, they're looking for consistency. And so they roast darkly because, as you roast darkly, you make things more homogenous. That’s how they get there.
Jools Walker: So Scott, you're saying that back in the two thousands, people were roasting dark and blending. But I've tasted amazing single origin coffees. I mean, I've had coffees that have sparkled with flavors of fruit and flowers and it all came from a single farm. So just think of all the flavor potential and amazing coffees people were missing out on by roasting, dark and blending, all of these coffees.
Scott Bentley: Yeah. But it was really hard to find good coffees from single farms back then, because the vast majority of coffee farmers themselves, weren't actually focusing on picking and processing their coffees really carefully.
But then, things kind of started shifting and some farmers did start focusing on a lot of careful picking and processing. And Sonja started tasting these coffees that were really interesting and unique and her mindset towards how to roast these coffees then started to change.
Sonja Bjork Grant: This just came automatically, because when you get higher quality coffee, you actually want to feel the flavours of the coffee. You didn't want to have that roast taste as that first taste. So, that's why we started to experiment with our job as a roaster. You know, if the farmer is growing higher quality coffee, why are we not, on the other end, doing our job to develop our skills?
Scott Bentley: So then this becomes a sort of virtuous circle. So as more people tasted unique and special coffees and paid more for them at the end, farmers were being incentivized to grow more of it.
Jools Walker: And the more unique and special the flavors, the last thing you wanted to do was taste the roast. You wanted to showcase the uniqueness of the coffee.
Scott Bentley: Absolutely.
Jools Walker: But Scott, that lightly roasted estate coffee that Jay Rayner tasted was really hard to drink. I mean, how did it go so far in that direction? Why weren't people protesting and kicking up a stink about it?
Scott Bentley: What were they writing in the streets about their espressos? Well, it's a really good point. And the thing is, this became more than just showcasing flavors. I mean, the Rebel Alliance set off their millennium Falcons and staff fighters to take down the evil, dark empire.
Jools Walker: Okay, this sounds pretty ominous. And you know, I want to hear more about this, but let's take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsors.
Scott Bentley: It’s time to take a coffee trip with Siemens Home Appliances.
Jools Walker: All right then, Mr. Bentley, where are you taking me off to today?
Scott Bentley: Today Jools, I'm flying you to Felipe and Carlos Arcila’s farm in the middle of the coffee triangle in Colombia.
Jools Walker: Now this coffee Jardines del Eden and it's been roasted by our friends of the show, Hundred House Coffee.
Scott Bentley: Now this type of coffee is causing massive controversy in the coffee snob world at the moment. Basically, it's a farm in Colombia called Jardines del Eden and it's going wild with some processing techniques at the moment.
Jools Walker: Processing is the stage between picking the coffee cherries and getting green beans ready to roast.
Scott Bentley: Now this coffee, they're actually adding strawberries into the fermentation tank.
Jools Walker: Why is that so controversial?
Scott Bentley: A lot of the coffee purists are saying: no stop adulterating these flavors. They're good enough on their own. You don't need to add more stuff. But it's really interesting. And I think we're definitely going to do something on this on a later episode.
Jools Walker: Now, I think it's time for us to savor the flavor with the Siemens EQ 700.
Scott Bentley: Right. So, I'm opening the Siemens Home Connect App and I'm going to click on my coffee maker and I'm choosing an Americano and we're going to have it strong, and we're going to have 140 mls. And I'm now going to hit start.
I brew this as an Americano because I didn't want milk that was going to cloud it. Okay Jools, I don’t know if you can smell this…
It's so super fruity,
Jools Walker: That is grapefruit. And maybe a little bit of peach, blood orange.
Scott Bentley: Yes.
Jools Walker: And that was a coffee trip with Siemens Home Appliances.
So Scott, let's take it back to the 2000s, right?
Scott Bentley: The naughties?
Jools Walker: The naughties, sorry. I'm showing my age with the 2000s, but so all these roasters are discovering all the amazing flavors that farmers are able to produce.
So this is what gets me, how on earth did it end up getting so acidic and who on earth thought that that was a really good idea?
Scott Bentley: Okay. Right. Well, so here's the question. If you go to a coffee festival today, describe it to me. Who's there. What's it like?
Jools Walker: Okay. So I've, I've been to a few coffee festivals before in my time. And there is a really good vibe there. I mean, it's a buzzing atmosphere. There's lots of coffee. There's lots of excitement and lots of people, you know, pushing boundaries and going for new things.
Scott Bentley: Well, I mean, that's what specialty coffee is today, but 20 years back, it's a pretty dull industry. It's all run by white men in suits, stood politely in front of tables of their products or neatly laid out.
Sonja Bjork Grant: They were sleeping and they were not thinking about quality.
Scott Bentley: This is how Sonja remembers the old school coffee peeps.
Sonja Bjork Grant: They were stuck. they were happy. They were getting fast and they were like, yeay! We are not going to do anything more.
Jools Walker: Okay. So that sounds like people who were pretty happy with where they were, and not particularly interested in progress when it comes to coffee.
Scott Bentley: But specialty coffee, that was us a reaction against it.
Sonja Bjork Grant: Like in music and in everything, like we have the, they come in and they won’t change. We are like young and we want respect and all of that stuff. And I think that was part of it, young baristas, they wanted to do something new. And to do something new, you kind of have to push the boundaries.
want of young barristers something new and to do something new, you kind I love this idea of, coffee punks that Sonia is talking about here as well, just like coming in and disrupting everything.
Jools Walker: I love this idea of coffee punks that Sonja is coming about, just coming and then disrupting everything.
Scott Bentley: Yeah, I think it was real. I mean, they, weren't all there with sort of like bright pink sprayed Mohicans, but to the sort of like fat cats that were kind of hawking these beans, they were pretty much the same thing.
Jools Walker: So what did this reaction actually look like? What were this young coffee punks serving up?
Scott Bentley: So, Sonja actually set up her own roastery back in 2008.
Sonja Bjork Grant: Yeah. And that's when I started the single origin, only directly from a farm. I was only importing from different farmers from Colombia. And I did that those five years. Every morning when the customers came in, they were just asking how is the coffee of Javier today?
They were like on a first name basis with the farmer, you know, every day. And that was kind of like, revolutionary in Iceland.
Jools Walker: I love the idea of just already being on first name basis with the farmers and just establishing that connection, like really getting to the excuse, the pun, but just the root of everything that's really cool.
Scott Bentley: Yeah, I mean, we talk about origin don't we, and even if you go to supermarket and you look at, somebody says, you know, grown in Portugal, but can you imagine if, as you said, grown by Javier?
Jools Walker: It impacts. You know, then it kind of sounds like it's all about actually honoring farmer and showcasing their work and what it is that they're doing in coffee. And guessing that's why they roasted lighter because you're actually able to get more flavors from the farmer.
Scott Bentley: Absolutely. You're tasting the origin and the farm and the coffee itself. You're not tasting the roast.
Buthen maybe what happened is it, might've got all a bit militant. (22:47)
Jools Walker: Oh, big word.
Scott Bentley: Nick actually spoke about it in terms of a noble quest. He uses the phrase “commitment to the cause.”
Nick Mabey: Displayed your kind of commitment to the cause, in a way. If you were unwilling to compromise there.
Jools Walker: Okay, Scott. I've got to ask, what exactly is the cause that's being mentioned here?
Scott Bentley: You mentioned it earlier, it’s honoring the farmer. If you do anything that obscures the work of the farmer, you're a bad person.
Jools Walker: Okay. Hypothetically, what about if you were adding sugar to your coffee?
Scott Bentley: Absolutely not. I mean, this is what would happen if you walked into Sonja shop and asked her for sugar.
Sonja Bjork Grant: And I said, no, in this place, there is no sugar. The sugar is inside the coffee. So you remember those phrases? Yeah.
Jools Walker: I've had that happen to me before, when I've gone into a coffee shop and got shamed for wanting to put sugar in it. So I'm out.
Scott Bentley: Yeah, no, it wasn't a good time when people did that. So look, roasters coffee, shop owners, they all began advocating for really lightly roasted coffee in their cafes because to them it honored the farmer.
But to me, it actually started to get all a bit out of control. I mean, just picking up from what Nick said earlier.
So fast forward a few years, I mean, he co-founded Assembly Coffee Roasters in London and he's roasting pretty light and now he's competing with all the other roasters. They're also roasting pretty light.
Nick Mabey: Most roasters when they started off, when we did were very insecure about roasting, and people were afraid that they would be perceived to be dark roasters, which was to say that they're shitty roasters. So, everyone was kind of adopting the other end of the spectrum as their default setting.
Scott Bentley: So if I can just sum a little of that up. There's a perception in London at the time, that if you roasted dark, you're essentially a bit of a shitty roaster. And so everyone went the opposite direction and started roasting light, in a reaction against the dark roast thing.
But they weren't necessarily doing it any better. They were just doing the opposite.
Nick Mabey: Precisely. And I think it was probably a period of time where there was a false or really falsifiable kind of understanding that light roasting coffee is ultimately the better roasted coffee.
Scott Bentley: Everyone starts roasting lighter and everyone starts becoming obsessed with acidity.
Nick Mabey: You had to have coffee that stood out in terms of acidity. When we were on cupping table was you were looking for the thing that just popped at you.
Jools Walker: This idea that acidity is the thing that makes you different. Like the more acidic you can make it, more out there you are with your coffee and, the better the coffee is.
Scott Bentley: Yeah, but there is a little bit of thing behind this because you know, coffee comes from a fruit and fruit is generally acidic. So again, it's this idea of honoring the product. This is coffee, Jay Rayner tasted in London 10 years ago now, you know?
Jools Walker: Yeah, people we're running to the edge of the cliff with this, Right? But there is a point where clearly they just ran right off, jumped, went over the cliff and that's what Jay Rayner ended up getting in his cup. Like, I don't know, just a quite extremely acidic coffee.
Scott Bentley: Think of coffee lemons.
Jools Walker: I was just thinking about lemmings, actually! But did they actually like those really acidic coffees that they were putting out there?
Scott Bentley: Well, people said they were, I mean, this is the funny thing, Jools. coffee nerds everywhere were saying, yeah, we really, really liked this and they were asking for it. Maybe that's part of being in the club, buying into the philosophy.
Jools Walker: I was just going to say, this makes me think of when the Negroni craze kicked off in food scene that I was part of many, many moons ago. I knew some people who were forcing themselves to drink Negroni's because it was the cool thing, even though they didn't particularly like them.
Scott Bentley: What? Who doesn't like Negroni's?
Jools Walker: I'm not one of those people, but it's, it can be a very acquired taste if you're used to maybe something sweeter or what have you. And it just feels like this with, coffee, if acidic coffee was the thing, then everybody should be drinking it.
Scott Bentley: The funniest thing for me is Kenyan coffees as some of the most prized in the world, and they're definitely some of the most prized in my heart.
And when you do it right, you get these gorgeous, big red, fruity notes of bluberries. I mean, it's stunning. They're really, really great. But when you under roast, you can make this coffee tastes like tomatoes. And there was this thing where people were prizing tomato soup tasting Kenyans. It was nuts.
Jools Walker: Okay. I don't want tomato soup in my cup of coffee. That's not for me.
Scott Bentley: No, I mean, we talk about fruit, but no one wants to taste vegetables in their in their coffee.
Jools Walker: Just to be pedantic here. Tomato is a fruit, Scott.
Scott Bentley: True that. I stand correctly.
Jools Walker: So Scott, where are we actually at today? Because I don't think I have had a coffee that acidic in a very long time.
Scott Bentley: You know, essentially the coffee industry kind of grew up, started to mature.
Jools Walker: Does this mean that the punks had to sort of go back on their own little revolution there?
Scott Bentley: Well, maybe. Fankly, I think they were, kind of the minority and most people didn't really like those super, super acidic coffees. So, for example, Nick is part of two businesses, Assembly and Volcano Coffee Works.
Now Assembly does do the more avant-garde, the more high grade, the more experimental specialty coffee. But volcano is more medium to dark roasted and it's more crowd-pleasing. And he told me back in the day, he sold four times more of the darker roast, this stuff than the lighter roasted stuff.
Jools Walker: That kind of suggests that there are a lot more people out there who don't want super light roasted coffee.
Scott Bentley: Yeah. And basically everyone in the specialty coffee industry, Sonja, Nick, and others, we've spoken to, have realized…
Nick Mabey: You have to understand your audience, ultimately, and that should determine how you approach roasting. That is the fundamental truth.
Scott Bentley: And so for many specialty roasters, including Nick…
Nick Mabey: I would say we're very much in the middle now. I would say that we are fundamentally less lighter than we were, because I think the market has caught up.
Sonja Bjork Grant: I mean, we absolutely went too far into having completely raw and disgusting flavors of light roasted coffee. Absolutely. You are correct. But I think had to happen. We had to go as far on the other… on the light scale as possible. And then we can go back and meet in the middle.
Nick Mabey: Yeah. I think that's the teething pains of an immature industry. I kind of all evident there
Jools Walker: So, maybe Jay Rayner was actually right all along.
Scott Bentley: Mmm, well look, Jools. I won't go maybe that far, but the funny thing is Jay Rayner did give us a short message as to why he didn't want to come and be part of this podcast and why he didn't really want to position himself as maybe somebody who had won the argument. This is what he had to say:
“Thank you for the kind thought, but I react instinctively to these things and truth be told, I cannot summon the will to wade into this. The backlash was so ludicrous, one man threatened me with physical violence, that I declined to engage with it (and he means the light roasts debate here) by claiming some sort of victory. Not least because it will probably all kick off again. But as I say, thank you for thinking of me.”
Jools Walker: Do you think that it would actually kick off again?
Scott Bentley: No, I think as an industry, as Nick has said, as Sonya has said, I think it's matured. It's grown up and it's moved much closer to what the consumer wants rather than you know, where we were back then.
Jools Walker: Are you sure about that, Scott? Because we could always go and grab a nice espresso from your local Italian deli and some sugar in it.
Scott Bentley: I think it's time to roll the credits, Jools.
Dear listener. We're going to be at the London Coffee Festival and we're looking for some people to help us tell the world about Adventures in Coffee. If you'd like to help us out, you'll get free tickets and it's also a paid gig. We are not asking you for do this for nothing. And you get to hang out with us and drink great coffee all day long. So if you're interested, shoot us an email at adventuresincoffee@gmail.com.
Jools Walker: You can help us keep the show rolling by joining Patreon as well. Now, it's a platform where you can support the creators you love. It helps keep our lights and our mics on and you get to shape the show directly. So for example, we sent out the Sri Lanka coffee to two lucky Patreons.
Now you can check the link in the show notes for more.
Scott Bentley: If you like the show, please tell a friend and maybe think for a moment who would love a podcast about coffee. I know, you need to tell your local barista, that's right. It is surprising to us still today that so many people in the coffee industry haven't heard of the show. So, tell them about Adventures in Coffee.
Jools Walker: And the other thing that you can do as well is create an Instagram story from a screen grab and tag us into it. So you can tag me at @ladylo, Scott at @caffeinemag, and James at @filterstoriespodcast. And you know what we'll do? We'll repost it.
Scott Bentley: This podcast was produced by James Harper, the creator of the coffee podcast, Filter Stories.
Jools Walker: And he's also the dude that wrote and plays the piano music you hear in the background and the editing was done by Amideo Berta.
Scott Bentley: So Jools, what are we exploring on our next step?
Jools Walker: Oh, Scott, we are looking into how to get more bang for your buck, with your coffee setups with none other than coffee YouTuber Lance Hedrick. Now, how much should you spend on a grinder? Should you be dropping three grand on your first espresso machine?
Scott Bentley: Yes, you should. Maybe not, but until then, don't be ashamed of the coffee you love and we'll see you next time.
Jools Walker: Buh-bye.