Confusing Culture - Tasting Counter Culture's Forty-Six "dark roast"

I've always liked Counter Culture coffee. My first taste was at the Red Truck Rural Bakery in Warrenton, Virginia about seven years ago. I got a cup of drip coffee and drank it while walking through the quaint town. It was one of those rare experiences where you upend the cup to get the last drop because it was so pleasing. I don't remember too much about the coffee other than it was balanced and clean tasting. I returned to the bakery to find out what they brewed and the answer was Counter Culture.

Counter Culture started in 1995 in Durham, North Carolina and has been a rising star in the coffee world since then. A couple years ago Brad and I attended our 3 day La Marzocco technical training hosted at Counter Culture's new roastery in Emeryville, CA. Every day the coffee flowed like water and my first cup, a light roast, was really good. All the coffees they brewed for us were light roast and as the class progressed my tolerance for high acid coffee eroded to the point where, by day 3, the thought of even a sip made my stomach knot up.

Missing the Target

The other night Paula was shopping at a national retailer when she called to ask if I liked Counter Culture coffee.  She was looking at some bags on a shelf so I asked her to get anything they might call dark roast, reasoning it would be the closest to what I had years ago in Virginia. She found a reference to dark roast on a bag of "Forty-Six". I was pretty excited to recapture my Red Truck experience, reading on the side of the bag how it was their darkest roast, but it didn't turn out that way.

Words Mean Something

Counter Culture's labeling of Forty Six as a dark roast is a case study in modern roasters' arbitrary use of roast level terms. While limited in scope, roast level terms are a useful descriptor of one characteristic of a given coffee. They can be thought of like the terms used to describe a steak's "doneness". Just like "medium rare" doesn't tell you anything about  a steak's texture, richness or flavors, roast level doesn't communicate a coffee's body, acidity, smoothness or flavor notes. Standardized terms are helpful if they follow some objective, consistent standard but if the terms are subjective the whole system breaks down.

For decades the term "dark roast" was pretty consistent from one coffee company to the next.   Admittedly, the waters have always been muddied by romantic but amorphous roast terms like French, Italian, Turkish and Viennese, but generally the dark roast description fell within an acceptable standard deviation. If you bought a bag of "dark roast" or French Roast, you could expect very dark brown beans with a glossy sheen of coffee oils on the surface.

Light is the new Dark

Then in the early 2000's came so-called Third Wave coffee. The new breed of renegade roasters were competing to see who could roast coffee the lightest. Intelligentsia was one of the original Sour Patch Kids roasters and I remember buying a bag of their "El Diablo", described as a "dark roast" coffee. I was really interested to see how a modern roaster would handle a dark roast but was stunned when I opened my $20 bag of light tan, oil-less beans that still had a lot of chaff wedged in the beans' cleavage. Sure enough, the brewed product was sharp, acidy and light bodied. Not quite as severe as their other coffees  but puckery nevertheless.

Intelligenstia's liberties with the term 'dark roast' are typical of Third Wave roasters who look down their pierced noses at coffee roasted anywhere close to "second crack" (the point in the roast when coffee begins its transition from medium to the traditional dark roast level). Calling their least light coffees  "French Roast" or dark roast seems like an inside joke, belittling traditional tastes and sensibilities. Ageism aside, the problem with such relative roast nomenclature is that it ends up confusing and frustrating consumers.

Science to the Rescue

Happily roast levels can be objectively categorized by using a spectrophotometer called an Agtron that measures a coffee's reflectivity with near-infrared wavelengths. The device is really measuring the color of the bean not a degree of roast specifically, but the color measurement is helpful. The higher the Agtron number, the lighter the roast. Coffee Review editor Kenneth Davids brackets the palatable range of Agtron roast levels from 95 as the lightest roast to 25 as the darkest.

More useful Agtron benchmarks than the extremes are familiar coffees. A classic dark roast, Peet's Major Dickason's blend, has been measured by Coffee Review at Agtron readings in the mid-30s. Most of the light roast, Third Wave coffees are in the 70s. A third key reference point is second crack - the Mason-Dixon line between medium roast and dark roast. The Agtron reading at second crack is 50. The 50 to 45 level is often referred to as Full City, Viennese or Light French and is the start of the dark roast end of the spectrum.

Back to Counter Culture and their self described dark roast, "Forty-Six". The description from their website:

"Reclaiming dark roasts from the realm of less-than-great coffee, we take some of our best and roast them with care in Forty-Six to create something complex, sweet, clean, smoky, and nuanced."

I'll ignore the cheap shot at their roasting forefathers and focus on their flavor description. Let's start with their labeling this as a dark roast. They are kind enough to put the Agtron numbers for their coffees on their website and "Forty-Six" clocks in at  52. Granted it's close, but it's still on the medium side of the border between dark and medium. To pronounce they are "reclaiming dark roasts" is more than a stretch, but I knew that the moment I poured some beans in my hand.  The beans had zero oil on the surface, were a medium brown color with a fair amount of chaff in their crack. The only other descriptor I'll comment on is "smoky". It's not smoky. It's a little grainy with some nice raisiny notes and a light to medium body. To be fair, this coffee probably tastes much better fresh but when you sell it at Target you lose control.

Perusing through other coffees on the Counter Culture website I found Agtron readings ranging mostly from 70 to 80. This range, which occurs shortly after First Crack, is squarely light roast. The only roast level lighter than this is the virtually undrinkable "Cinnamon" roast level. Their sole coffee besides Forty-Six that had escaped the 70s was Big Trouble, at 63, putting it in the "Light-Medium" category. I am not critical of Counter Culture or any roaster living in this one region of the roast spectrum. Light roasted coffee has its strengths and if that's what they love I think it's wise they stick to it. The problem is modern roasters like Counter Culture improperly using the dark roast identifier for coffee that is by no objective measure dark. This loose treatment of the term 'dark' dupes rank and file customers who think they will be getting a caramelized, nutty, full-bodied coffee but instead get something that drinks more like tea (with lemon).

Dig the New Breed

The style pendulum swings back and forth over time and the coffee industry is no different. First wave coffee was light roasted and by the 1960s spiraled downward into a miasma of watery cheapness. The muscular reaction from Alfred Peet and a few others was high quality beans, roasted dark and brewed strong. Starbucks and others stood on the shoulder of Peet's while the maturation of the Second Wave devolved into tired, dark roast-centric cafes serving bloated, sugary drinks. The Third Wave roasters and cafes were truly counter culture with lighter roasts, minimalistic menus, precise brewing techniques and transparent sourcing of beans. Their admirable principles are now dogma. To be accepted by the coffee illuminati light roasting is a prerequisite, roasting to second crack is shameful and the cafes are cookie-cutter shrines of pretentiousness. If the Third Wave doesn't widen their tent with a broader roast spectrum I suspect there will there be a Fourth Wave that melds high quality standards with diverse roast levels. Ironically a modern roaster taking their beans to second crack is now the new radical.  Fight the power!