It took a while to develop... but a new dark roast is part of the Garage Roasters product line...
I'm a medium roast person through and through... it's part of the reason why I started roasting in the first place. My early, pre-roasting, experience with Third Wave coffee was that I really disliked the tidal wave of unripe and harsh acidity that I sensed (in terms of that acidity, think lemon citrus). From a totally different perspective, I was well over the roastiness forward flavours (plus excessive bitterness) of more traditional darker espresso roasts. The one benefit of those darker roasts was very satisfying texture.
Medium roasts provided, to me, the best of both worlds. Identifiable fruit flavour characteristics arising from the core of the underlying green coffee, enough texture to be highly satisfying, and also the correct level of ripe acidity to round out the palate experience (think orange or plum acidity).
I have had a number of clients ask for a darker roast... not my preference but clearly what some clients are looking for. Given that I couldn't use my own taste buds to guide the roasting process I decided to enlist those of a client, Daniel Mendelow. Now Daniel is not just any client, he is also a coffee roaster as well as having been the Principal Trumpet for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra for decades... an individual with high standards!
We've tasted a heap of different experimental coffees, changing roast level as well as underlying blend of coffee origins and have settled on something which displays incredible power but also possesses a reassuring level of finesse and elegance. This coffee, I'm calling it Bête Noire, is the proverbial iron fist in a velvet glove. It's roasted darker, and therefore displays more roasty character. It has a small proportion of high quality Vietnamese Robusta which gives the coffee texture and punch (Robusta has double the amount of caffeine relative to Arabica). There's the obligatory Brazilian component (hopefully Brazilian coffee will still be available given drought in that country) providing the classic blend characters of chocolate and nuts. Finally there is a component of Guatemalan coffee which gives the blend a slight and bright lift on the end palate. Daniel suggested that Bête Noire is to Ashfield Blend as a brass band is to a string quartet! You've got to love a musical simile.
So why did I call this blend Bête Noire? To be honest I thought I'd never roast Robusta... and I was wrong. Robusta definitely has a place in a good (traditional style) blend. And I'll say something which I'll probably contradict myself on in the future... I think it will be a long time before I offer a Robusta single origin in the line up!
If you've been looking for a darker blend then here it is! If you try some I'd really love to hear your thoughts!
Click here to buy Garage Roasters new Bête Noire blend and for the next two days you can use the discount code DARK to save 10%. Please note that I will likely not roast the first production batch until early next week.
To understand the anatomy of a coffee cherry click here
To learn about the coffee taster's flavour wheel click here