Why does my coffee taste like it’s flavored?!

Coffee is an amazing thing. Not a lot has changed on the harvesting and processing side of the industry over the last century, but what has changed is a new interest in lighter roasted coffees.

Up until about 30 years ago, at-home coffee culture in America drank, almost entirely, dark roasted instant coffee. In the late 80s, Starbucks changed the game by making whole bean coffee accessible at grocery stores. This was called the ‘Second Wave’ of coffee. But they still roasted their coffee dark. This was on purpose because roasting darker where most of the origin flavors are replaced with smoke and bitterness is the best way to get flavor consistency across hundreds of thousands of lbs of roasted coffee. At the time this was perfectly fine because most people still preferred dark roasted coffee.

Fast forward to about 15 years ago. A new scene emerges. The ‘Third Wave’. Small batch roasters started roasting lighter which maintains the origin flavors of the coffee. You could drink a coffee from Kenya that tastes like someone dropped a fresh strawberry into the cup. I’ve had coffee from Brazil that tastes like Nutella. You could put milk in it and it would taste more like a mocha than a latte. People trying lighter roasted coffee for the first time often think it’s flavored coffee, but that’s the beauty of good light roasted coffee.

But how do those flavors get into the cup?

Coffee farms are most affected by two things: Elevation and Climate. Coffee trees need a tropical climate but they also need cooler temperatures. For this reason, you mostly see coffee grown within a specific belt on both sides of the Equator and in regions that have areas of high elevation. Something a lot of coffee drinkers don’t know is that the higher the elevation the farm lives in, the more fruity and acidic the coffee will be. This is why, for example, high elevation coffees from Ethiopia and Colombia are often very fruit forward and citrusy when roasted lighter. Medium elevation coffees like Central Americans tend to have more chocolate and darker sugar notes like caramel, molasses, and toffee. Lower grown coffees like Sumatran tend to be more earthy and nutty.

This is all due to environmental conditions and the natural chemical composition of the farm’s soil. So next time you have a cup of light or medium roasted coffee, see if there are specific flavors you can pick out and understand that those flavors aren’t added in, but are organically developed by nature!

Science is cool.