For years our bags said "light," "medium," or "dark," because that's what bags say. A customer asked me last winter what "medium" meant, and I gave her an answer that took two minutes and contradicted itself twice. That was the day we decided to stop printing the word.
The problem is that the light–medium–dark scale describes one thing — how long the bean stayed in the roaster — and pretends to describe the thing you actually care about, which is how the coffee tastes. Those two are related, but loosely. A washed Kenyan roasted to the same color as a natural Brazilian will taste nothing alike. The number on the dial is the same. The cup is a different planet.
What the words hide
"Medium" in particular is a shrug. It's the temperature of a thermostat nobody set. One roaster's medium is another's light, and a third roaster uses it to mean "we roasted this dark enough to cover up a flaw and didn't want to admit it." The word travels well on a shelf and tells you almost nothing.
Roast level is a setting on a machine. Flavor is the thing you're buying. We'd rather describe the second one.
What we print instead
Now the bag tells you three things in plain language. First, where it sits on the spectrum in words a person can use: we roast most of our coffees to keep the origin character intact, so you'll see phrases like "roasted to hold the fruit" rather than a color word. Second, the flavors we actually taste — not a wheel of forty possibilities, just the three or four that show up every time. Third, what it's good for: filter, espresso, or happy in both.
- The Kiriga AA says "roasted light to keep the fruit forward," because that's the whole point of it.
- The Burnside Blend says "built for espresso, comfortable in a moka pot," because that's how people drink it.
- Nightshift says "our darkest, made for cream and a slow morning," which is honest about both the roast and the occasion.
None of this is revolutionary. Plenty of roasters describe their coffee well. We just decided to stop hedging it with a word that undoes the description. If a bag of ours tells you what's in the cup and never once says "medium," that's working as intended.
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