I recently had an unwitting encounter with medium roast (at the same "semi-fancy" price point as I typically buy) when my wife put some fresh beans in our coffee container. First cup I made, I was wondering why the coffee tastes so bad, bad enough for me to dump it. There were all those weird sour/almost soda like notes that should not be in coffee. Then I got suspicious about the look of the beans, then I asked my wife... "I decided it would be good to try something new" ;)
Medium is my comfort zone though!
Simple overview here: https://coffeechronicler.com/grind-size-chart/
I roast some coffee that could be considered to be 'light' from a color/roast temp perspective but has absolutely none of the floral/citrus notes that you talk about. It depends so much on the beans. It ends up chocolatey and vanilla, with a medium body. Very little acidic taste. On the other hand, there's plenty of coffee that is just a punch of acid.
As others have stated, you lose so much bean origin character the further into the roast you get and lose what makes the bean itself special.
Every "hopocalypse" type beer is utterly forgettable. It's like when you go to some tourist-y small town in the Midwestern US and the gift shop has five hundred different INSANELY HOT SAUCES no one's heard of.
I guess "hoppy" is a powerful, accessible flavor that anyone can easily make, like squeezing a bottle of Sriracha onto some noodles.
Hoppy is anything but accessible, in my experience, clearly some people love them but most casual drinkers do not. I personally find certain DIPAs to be a near religious experience but others can’t stand them. To each their own.
So glad we cleared up that everyone has opinions.
I’m just glad we have so many options to try and do many craft brewers having fun with it.
But I’ll also admit that heavily browned beef has a distinctive flavor and quality very different from barely cooked steak. Imagine a sandwich with slightly crispy, well cooked beef and all its drippings. Now imagine one with a slice of meat that’s rare and soggy.
Coffee is similar. Different roasts for different desires and uses. There is a point where it is objectively burnt, but not all dark roasts are burnt.
I usually like my steaks straight up raw, but most steak snobs I know insist on medium-rare as the "perfect" temperature. Truthfully, I won't usually complain about anything from tartare to medium, and you're right, the different amount of doneness has a drastic effect on flavors and sometimes you just want one flavor profile or another.
Bit of a false dichotomy here. I would take a medium sandwich here. Medium gets you the firmness that you’re hinting that you want for a sandwich without turning it into beef jerky.
you mean a stack of thinly sliced bloody sheets of rare roast beef? I don't know what you're talking about, it makes an excellent sandwich.
I can taste sour, burnt, and something in the middle that I really like, and that's about it.
Not a scientific experiment by any means, but there seems to be more people like me who cannot taste these flavors in coffee than you.
believe me, i don't have a super palette and have a hard time finding the right notes myself. you can try tasting while looking at the SCA coffee wheel[1], using the inner ring for broad categories.
I'll keep trying it because I do quite enjoy bitter and roasted flavors but the straight light-roasted espresso I got most recently was verging on undrinkable.
Dark roasts and light roasts and everything in between are common here in Australia, where we have a fairly rich history with espresso coffee.
Notwithstanding that this isn't measured whatsoever, it also develops flavor. It's just that it becomes more one-note. You won't taste fruitiness or other delicate things, but I don't want my coffee to taste like fruity tea. Neither do most people.
You like it because it gets you more high.
Many things affect that, though. Someone in a constant state of anxiety and stress is running on adrenergic circuits instead of dopaminergic, and thus will probably like the taste of poppy seeds, because the minuscule amounts of opiate alkaloids will make an ever so slight dent on that adrenergic activity and allow dopaminergic activity to dominate.
It’s a similar story for coffee, but there is a lot of variability both in coffee and drinker. Someone with a high activity MAO-A gene variant will clear dopamine and other neurotransmitters from the brain more quickly. Darker roasts contain more MAO-A inhibitors, and so they are more commonly preferred by people with such gene variants.
Same goes for MAO-B; inhibitors for it are more likely to be found in lighter roasts with floral overtones.
If anything, you’ve now shown that you carry a belief that ”getting high” is inherently a negative prospect. What I wrote carries no such default.
Removing some flavours and adding others. The fact that you prefer the initial flavours is subjective.
