Your morning routine is a personal experience. You do what you need to do to prepare yourself to achieve your goals and get the job done for the day.

Coffee is an integral part of that morning routine. You need a flavour profile that excites you each and every day. If you like to fill your mug with a dark roast, we have a variety of options to give you a morning kick.

Let's find your ideal dark roast. To do it we’re going to examine what exactly makes a dark roast coffee and the variety of flavour profiles you will experience.

What is Dark Roast Coffee?

We are serious about roasting. Serving a good coffee comes down to the subtleties and nuances. Those are the places where our passion resides and what the roasting process unlocks.

We’ve gone into the difference between medium and dark roast coffee before, but we need to talk about the roasting process to understand what a dark roast is.

When roasting a bean, you are listening for the crack. That is where the precision comes in. As the beans are heated, they let out a cracking sound. When the bean passes the second crack, about 240 C or 464 F, that's where the dark roast magic happens.

Because the beans are heated longer, oils move to the surface. A dark roast has a full-body flavour and the lowest acidity. What makes it a dark roast is the length of roasting; it has nothing to do with the origin of the bean or the caffeine content.

What is a French Roast?

Yes, there is more to the roasting process than light, medium, and dark roasts. Each roast profile has its own subcategories. French roasts are a subcategory of dark roasts. All of our dark roasts are French roasts, so understanding what French roast means is pretty important.

The classification of French roast has everything to do with the colour of the bean. French-roasted coffee tends to have a dark chocolate colour, with a smokey, rich flavour. It got its name because France is where the roasting style originated in the 1800s.

If you prefer a little more of a scientific perspective, there is a tool (or reflectance spectrophotometer if you want to get super technical) called an Agtron Coffee Roast Analyzer. It measures the colour of the bean and assigns it a number to determine the roast profile.

The bean's origin has nothing to do with determining if it will be an American, Viennese, French or Italian roast. For example, our French roasts come from Mexico and Guatemala.

Now that we have a better understanding of dark roasts and French roasts, let's talk about the good stuff: coffee that's ready to brew!