The case against the dark roast comeback

Dark roast is fashionable again. The argument goes that speciality went too far — too acidic, too thin, too clever — and that the answer is to take the roast back to where it used to be. Half of that is right.

What people actually miss

The complaint is almost never about acidity in the abstract. It is about a cup that feels thin, that disappears in milk, that has nothing underneath it. That is a body problem and a sweetness problem — and roasting darker is only one way to solve it, the way that also burns off everything that made the lot worth buying.

Development time, charge weight and the density of the green all move body. So does the lot itself: a washed Ethiopian grown at altitude will never carry a flat white the way a natural from lower down will. Those are choices you can make without scorching anything.

Where dark still belongs

There is a real place for a deeper roast: an espresso built for milk, a lot with the density to take the heat, a bar that needs one profile to hold for eight weeks. We roast for that. What we will not do is roast a delicate lot dark and call it heritage.

Roasting past the flavour is not a style. It is a way of hiding what you bought.

If a coffee needs to be dark to taste like something, the problem started long before the roaster.