Our Coffee
Roast Colour Chart
The colour of roasted coffee reflects
its degree of roasting: The darker the roast the higher
the temperature
to which it was roasted. Unfortunately there is little consensus
on the names for each colour of roast. Fortunately, in 1995,
Agtron and the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA)
developed an
objective set of benchmarks in their
Roast Color Classification System.
The Agtron/SCAA Roast Color Classification
System provides roasters with a set of 8 colour calibrated
reference disks
for comparison to ground coffee samples. They
are designed to work with an Agtron near-infrared spectrometer
(an instrument
that can accurately compare the disk colour to that of a coffee
sample)
but they
can also be used by eye.
In the book Home
Coffee Roasting, Kenneth
Davids attempts to match some common names for coffee roasts
with Agtron Numbers in the Agtron/SCAA Roast Color Classification
System.
We have named our roasts to be compatible
with his definitions. We
have
also
cross
referenced
our
roast names with the its matching range in the Agtron scale
and we have identified correlation with the oily appearance
of the bean.
The
following chart shows our roast names from lightest to
darkest with a
cross
reference
to the approximate Agtron Number. Note that the colours
on the chart are
for illustrative
purposes only, as the actual subtleties of the scale
cannot
be reliably
reproduced
in web-browsers. |
