Strong Coffee

My latest conversation with friends has been about my curiosity to know what flavor qualities people find pleasing in the coffee they choose to drink. Most people don’t call out a brand’s coffee by name, but what I hear a lot, is “I like strong coffee”, or “I don’t like strong coffee”. I’m not sure what people are actually meaning by “strong” when it comes to flavor since strength isn’t a flavor, after all, it’s a level of intensity of the flavors their chosen coffee brings to them. In other words, it’s literally the “strength” that one brews his coffee. i.e., there you are in your undees standing in the kitchen making the morning’s brew, and you pump in 3 Tablespoons of coffee per 6 oz cup instead of the average 2. Therefore, you’ve made strong coffee. You can brew any coffee “strong”, in theory, because you can make it “stronger” than “normal”.

So what is flavor and where does it come from? The bottom line is that coffee is always going to taste coffee-ish. It won’t ever taste like pancakes, a candied apple, or beef jerky. However, coffee can certainly have flavor characteristics like these (ok, yeah, beef jerky is pushing it). Green coffees are graded on a scale. Simply put, there’s a range from bad to good to excellent. Not complicated right? Then, to get even more to the point, within the highest grade, known as Specialty Coffee, exists a sub-range from just ok to top quality. So if you’re following me, you could have “just ok” Specialty Coffee, or you could have “where are my socks because they’ve been knocked off” Specialty Coffee. A coffee is graded first by its physical characteristics, and then judged by what qualities it brings to the cup when drinking it. Considered in the rating of the coffee are flavor, fragrance, aftertaste, acidity, body, sweetness, uniformity, & balance. A good coffee importer goes to origin countries and makes buying selections based on the actual flavor in the cup when tasting the coffee. No kidding—sweet job. Coffees can have any range of ratings of the above categories, with an overall score being given to the complete cup.

Next, the roaster chooses coffees and determines how to roast and perhaps blend the coffees purchased in order to accentuate the flavors that they bring to the cup alone or blended with other coffees. Flavor impressions can run anywhere from blueberry to chocolate, to mango, to smoke, to cherry, to cinnamon, to caramel. The degree of roast then also adds an element of flavor…lighter or darker on the very same coffee will actually taste very different! Some coffees need to be roasted lighter to highlight their best flavors, and some need to be taken darker to do the same. A very dark roast can be tricky because it will completely overpower any of the subtle flavor characteristics and replace them with one flavor-burned campfire logs.

So “strength” isn’t really what people should be looking for when selecting a coffee, and a wide range of people associate “dark roast” with “strong”, and therefore choose that for a lack of a better idea of where to start. To help you decide what you’ll like best, look for:

• Quality of the bean being offered, remembering that Specialty Coffee can range from ok to fantastic.
• Freshness of the roast (even fantastic coffee will not have good flavor once it’s old).
• Flavor characteristics that sound good to you (meaning chocolate, citrus, smoke etc.)

Take the coffee home, and brew it to the strength you enjoy. If you’ve made the right pick for yourself, you’ll get the full on “oh yeah that’s some good stuff” feeling when you sip. If you make your coffee “strong”, but still don’t taste any flavor, you’re probably drinking something stale. If you taste flavor, but just not the flavor you like, pick a different coffee next time. Most websites or store shelves will describe their coffees’ flavor characteristics as well as roast degree to help you make a choice.

And finally, if you are, or you know this person, stage a flavor intervention:
“I really like my coffee to taste painfully nasty because then I feel more manly being able to choke it down….Meaning, I buy crappy, over-roasted, stale coffee, and brew it well above the normal scoop-to-water ratio to accentuate the nastiness even more. I impress my friends by doing this.”