It's Time To Try Something New
Step 4 – Exploring Coffee Roasts
This is going to set you up to have a great perspective not just on the taste of coffee as a whole, but on the specific characteristics of the French Press compared to other coffee brewers.
Let’s start with Dark Roast.
This is what most people start with drinking coffee.
It’s the easiest way to roast coffee if you don’t care about certain negative results.
It’s also the easiest way to get burnt coffee (one of the primary negative results, and one of the worst things you can do to coffee, in my taste opinion).
What it does do, is give you a flavor and taste experience that surrounds the oils of the coffee, as well as deeply caramelized sugars.
If you want thick, blacker than black coffee that verges on caustic, just get the darkest possible roast you can find.
Unfortunately, most of the natural flavor of coffee will be gone.
So we go onto Medium Roast.
Medium roasted coffee is taken to the point where there is a good level of caramelization of sugars in the coffee, but not too much.
Unless there’s a major error in roasting, you shouldn’t run into any burnt coffee.
Plus you can retain some of the natural flavors.
It’s common to run across things like dark and milk chocolate, cake-like tastes, rich nuttiness, brown sugar, cookies, etc.
And then we get to Light Roasts.
Light Roasted coffees take the coffee to the point where it can be brewed (I’ll explain more on the specifics in a later section).
The tastes of lighter roasted coffees tend to be the lighter and brighter flavors,
Commonly fruity, floral, and citrus.
These coffees are not all necessarily like tea, but some can be.
That particular characteristic is more the result of other factors which are more advanced, and I’ll cover later on.
For now, my task for you is this – try all three.
Try a dark, a medium, and a light roast with your French Press, and see which you enjoy the most, and why.
Don’t worry about being correct in your assessment, just give yourself an honest response to why you like one over the other.