so recently i read at starbucksmelody that starbucks finally decided to roast lighter. which means they roast regular dark brown now, instead of black? oh, what a surprise. i feel like quoting this video, “i once had an espresso at starbucks, but it was just for fun”.

this brings me to something i wanted to write about for some time. the light roast in nordic countries. so far visited by me: denmark, norway, sweden and iceland. and visited means, i had more than one coffee in that country …

after living in oslo for a year and now visiting it especially for tasting coffee, it became hard for me drinking coffee back here in germany or countries even further south. i can’t describe it better than oliver strand in his coffee in oslo article for the new york times. it made me really smile.

“The joke is the coffee is Oslo is so light that the beans go straight from jute bags to a grinder without ever seeing the inside of a roaster. It’s accurate as far as exaggerations go. To make a general observation, the small-batch roasters in the Nordic countries roast lighter than the rest of the world, and Oslo roasts lighter than the rest of the Nordic countries.”

“The coffees are so juicelike that I had to realign my frame of reference, abandon a few prejudices. At first it’s disorienting — the coffee isn’t like any other coffee. Then it’s exciting — the coffee isn’t like any other coffee.”

at the beginning it was really like he says. it is strange drinking or seeing so light roasted coffees, it just felt wrong. the surface of the bean is just so uneven and wrinkly, not to speak from the unpleasent color. it’s really not like the perfect bean on a billboard is supposed to look like.

hacienda la esmeralda. panama boquete. geisha. coffee collective.
(it even looks darker on the picture here)

but after time you start liking, ahm, i started liking the taste of the light roast. it feels that you don’t really realize the process all along. but once your back home, after spending time abroad in the north, drinking one of the “normal” coffees you used to drink at home, just feels so weird. you think that you prepared something wrong, try again, measure again, but it’s just there: you like the light roast and all of a sudden feel bad about the taste of the darker roast. personally, it is difficult characterizing flavors in dark roasted coffees, the “burnt” effect is just predominate. it is just hard for me finding all the numerous detailed flavors.

i know about the geographic division. further north, lighter roast, further south, darker roast. same inside each country. north italy, dark, south of italy, so dark, that you can only get it down with tons of sugar… it’s the fondness of your food. if your habit is to drink dark roast, so why try diffrent?

there are a few roasters here who start roasting lighter than they used to and they say that customers are contented so far. so maybe things will not only change at starbucks?

which means for me moving up north? buying coffee online? or buying coffees here, which are supposed to be meant for drip coffee, and then using them for espresso? but what to use for filter coffee then? i say, let’s just keep experimenting, and hey, will we all try something new?