Still troubleshooting why your coffee tastes bitter? Last week we talked about how coffee will easily stale and pick up freezer flavors. Here’s another possibility: you’ve got over-roasted coffee.

Every roasting company, large or small, has a different approach to taking green coffee and applying heat until it turns brown and the chemical compounds develop, creating our favorite beverage. Some companies like to use very light roasting, which maximizes the vegetal and bright fruity acid elements in coffees. Some companies prefer a dark roast, for that traditional smoky flavor that pairs well with milk and sugar. Other companies–and we are among them–let the bean determine its ideal profile, treating each origin country and micro-region differently.

We’ll get into how we choose our roasting approach in another post, but here at Caravan we tend to choose a roast that brings out the inherent sweetness and flavors of each coffee. If coffee is over-roasted, it can taste bitter or burnt, and you might blame that on your coffee preparation. In fact, it might simply be the roasting process your beans went through before they reached you.

We enjoy drinking coffees from a myriad of roasting companies! The best way to figure out which roasting profiles you like best is to drink lots of coffee and keep track of what you like. When you figure it out, let us know!

The post Notes from the Master: Over-Roasted Coffee? appeared first on Caravan Coffee.