By
Kathy McLaughlin
February 1. 2012
After years of convincing the nation's coffee drinkers that
dark-roasted brews are the classiest thing to fill a mug or takeout cup,
Starbucks, Peet's, and a new wave of high-end chains are rolling out the exact
opposite: light-roasted coffee.
The target customers for the new style of coffee are people
like Jackie Russell, a retired school administrator in Los Angeles. Ms.
Russell's son Ted Russell is something of a coffee connoisseur, who has shared
his passion for Peet's dark-roasted coffee with his mother. Only problem: She
hates it.
"It's really just a terrible taste to me. It almost
tastes like something that has burned," says Ms. Russell.
To capture customers like Ms. Russell, Starbucks Corp. in
January introduced Blonde Roast, a light-roasted blend now sold in the chain's
10,787 U.S. stores and which will be stocked in grocery stores this week.
Peet's Coffee & Tea will roll out two "medium roast" blends in
its 197 stores late next month. It introduced the lighter-roasted beans in
6,400 grocery stores in July.
More lightly roasted varieties of coffee are coming to
coffee shops, cafés and grocery shelves thanks to big coffee purveyors like
Starbucks and small, specialty roasters alike. Dark roasting brings out more of
the natural oils in the bean, making them look shinier than the lighter roasts.
1. Dark 'Espresso Roast' from Tully's Coffee. 2. Tully's light roast Breakfast
Blend. 3. Peet's Coffee's dark French roast. 4. Medium roasted 'Café Domingo'
from Peet's. 5. Medium House Blend from Starbucks. 6. Starbucks's lightly
roasted 'Blonde Veranda Blend.
A raft of new high-end cafes and coffee roasters, including
Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago and Los Angeles, Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in New
York and San Francisco, Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, and Handsome Coffee
Roasters in Los Angeles, take the embrace of light roast even further: They
only sell light-roasted coffee and say that dark roasting is tantamount to
ruining good coffee.
Coffee companies are doing well as demand grows world-wide,
though the economic downturn slowed expansion in the U.S., analysts say.This
drove firms to conjure up additional products—including light roasts—to draw in
new customers and sell more to their regulars.
It's a dramatic turn for the specialty coffee industry,
which began expanding rapidly 20 years ago. This new coffee differed from what
Americans were used to with its strong, bold, deep taste—partly the result of
dark-roasted beans. Many coffee snobs say they can only drink the dark brews at
Starbucks or Peet's, and that anything else tastes like dishwater.
Coffee companies are looking to sell lighter roasts to home
grinders and brewers, as well as to sit-down patrons at their cafés.
U.S. coffee drinkers may tend to think of dark roast as
European and sophisticated. However, light-roasted coffee, brewed strong, is
the norm in Northern Europe, including Germany and Scandinavia. Many high-end
roasters today are working to convince customers that light roasting is the
best way to coax the delicate, nuanced flavors out of high quality beans.
"When it is dark, you taste charcoal, the same charcoal
that's on a piece of toast," says Jeremy Tooker, owner of Four Barrel.
"We're trying to show you the reasons why you bought the coffee," by
light roasting and letting subtle flavors emerge.
Those are fighting words for die-hard dark-roasted coffee
fans and companies that popularized these bold brews.
"While it is true you can roast a coffee to the point
that you annihilate the flavor if you don't do it correctly, our approach is to
balance the origin with the flavor of the roast," says Andrew Linnemann,
director of coffee quality at Starbucks. The company rolled out Blonde Roast
after a growing number of customers asked the stores' baristas and commented on
the company website that they wanted lighter-roasted beans.
Starbucks also conducted a study last year using an online
questionnaire as well as taste tests in which people sampled coffee roasted to
different degrees of darkness. The company says 42% prefer a lighter roast.
Starbucks chose the term "blonde" because "light" can
"infer that something has been removed" or might confuse consumers
who think of light coffee as having milk added, a spokeswoman says. Plenty of
customers still prefer darker roasted beans, but now they have a choice, the company
says.
Tully's Coffee, a unit of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters
Inc., asks consumers on its website to first identify their preferred roasting
style, and then suggests suitable coffees.
One company that is strongly associated with dark roasting
is Peet's, a specialty coffee pioneer based in Emeryville, Calif. Its
"medium roast" offers customers a choice, but Peet's isn't saying
lighter roasting is better.
"It is quality that matters," not roasting style,
says Doug Welsh, Peet's vice president of coffee.
Coffee roasting is a complex craft, and the industry has no
consumer-friendly metric to identify how light or dark beans have been roasted.
Depending on the bean varietal, origin, density and the
desired result, beans can spend as little as nine minutes at 400 degrees or as
much as 16 minutes at 440 degrees, says George Howell, founder of Acton,
Mass.-based George Howell Coffee Co., which sells light-roasted beans wholesale
and over the Internet. Very dark roasted beans emerge from the process a
dark-brown color and release some of their oils to the surface. Light roasted
beans can be a light wood color and aren't oily.
A shift in the coffee market has made it easier for roasters
to buy directly from Latin American and African growers that produce the most
desirable beans. Until a decade or so ago, anything besides beans from various
producers blended together on the commodity market was tough to get. Specialty
coffee sellers relied on dark roasting to coax maximum flavor out of beans that
could be of middling quality.
Roasters disagree on which style is harder to do well. When
poorly done, light roasting can leave beans tasting grassy and raw, while
subpar dark-roasting can leave them tasting ashy and burned. Roasting style
doesn't affect caffeine content appreciably and dark-roasted coffee doesn't
provide more "buzz" than light. But because the flavor lingers in the
mouth longer, some drinkers mistakenly believe that darker brews have more
caffeine, said Mr. Linnemann of Starbucks.
Intelligentsia sells $19, 12-ounce bags of Anjilanaka
organic beans from Bolivia, which boast hints of "white grape, honey and
apple skin," the website says, while Blue Bottle's $18 Sidamo Taramessa
comes from a cooperative farm in Ethiopia and tastes "punchy,"
"winy" and "leathery," the company says. These
subtleties—along with the point of paying top dollar for the beans—would be
obliterated by heavy roasting, the companies say.
"If we lined up five coffees from different regions and
roasted them dark, then none of us could pick them out of a lineup," says
Tyler Wells, chief executive of Handsome, which sells coffee wholesale. Because
quality beans, properly roasted retain more natural sweetness, Mr. Wells says
that he won't offer sugar when he opens his first café in February. He adds he
has served thousands of coffees at events and has never offered sugar, to the
consternation of some consumers.
Many consumers erroneously associate dark-roasted coffee
with "strong" coffee, Mr. Howell says.
"Strength is a matter of how much coffee to
water," he says. While some drinkers enjoy the flavorful jolt of a dark
coffee, "light roast rewards waiting a little bit, like letting a wine
open after it has been poured," and can taste even better as it cools, Mr.
Howell says. Light roasts are best enjoyed without cream or sugar because they
can be naturally sweet and not bitter, he adds.
Both Peet's and Starbucks say their new roasts are bringing
in new customers and getting more espresso-drink buyers to purchase beans for
brewing at home. Mr. Russell reckons his mother is Starbucks's target customer
for Blonde Roast.
"I'm planning to give her a bag soon," Mr. Russell
says.
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Write to Katy McLaughlin at katy.mclaughlin@wsj.com