We are often asked, “What’s your strongest blend?” by customers who are looking to try our coffee. It's fair to say most people don't like a weak coffee! But what is meant by ‘strength’, when it comes to coffee, and is that what we’re really after, when it comes to picking a blend?
There are many words that people use to describe coffee; burnt, and bitter can be common negative ones, while sweet, or strong, are common positive descriptors.
When someone says they want a strong coffee blend, what they often mean is they prefer something with more ‘body’. This is especially true when plenty of milk is added to their coffee as brews with low ‘body’ do not cut through the milk and so the resulting flavour is ‘weak’. In this case, a more accurate request would be for one that is a dark enough roast, (generally medium-dark or darker,) as ‘body’ is developed in the latter end of the roasting process.
So when would we use the word strong?
When the word ‘strong’ is used in the coffee industry, it describes the amount of flavour, and not the flavour itself. It is the concentration, (and not the quality,) of flavour that will result in whether the coffee is weak, strong, or just right. What makes up the concentration is the ratio of coffee solubles to water (or milk, or whatever else has been put in the cup). So if a strong coffee is desired, then increasing the amount of coffee solubles, or decreasing the amount of water, (or milk,) will result in a stronger brew.
How do we up the ratio? To increase the amount of coffee solubles we can either extract more solubles out of the coffee we are putting into the brew by either lengthening the extraction process or using finer coffee grinds, (although we want to be careful to not cause the coffee to over extract, but that is for another article). Or we can increase the amount of coffee solubles available to be extracted by increasing the amount of coffee grinds in the brewing process.
On the other side of the brewing ratio, we can decrease the amount of water used in the brewing method (while keeping the extraction length the same) or decrease the amount of water or milk added afterward.
You might ask, “Practically, what does that look like for me?” If it is an espresso based coffee, then we can either add more coffee grinds into the basket, grind the beans finer to extract for longer, or add less water or milk afterwards.
For someone brewing a filter or plunger coffee, you can add more coffee grinds, extract for a longer, or decrease the amount of water you add. Changing one factor at a time is best.
The caffeine factor is worth noting here, as it can be what a customer is wanting to get out of their drink, and while it may seem like a darker roasted coffee can be more powerful in the mouth and therefore contain more caffeine, it’s more complicated than that. Darker roasted coffee can have slightly less caffeine than lighter roasted blends due to the caffeine being roasted out of the beans, but to balance this, darker roasted coffee is both more porous, causing the caffeine to be more easily extracted out, and is also weighs less, so more beans go into each brew when it is measured by weight, which allows for more caffeine in the resulting drink. All that to say, we can mistake the presence of bitterness in a coffee to be the taste of caffeine, and while it is a bitter flavour, it might not mean it’s going to wake you up any more than a lighter roast.
So, back to the original question; “What's your strongest blend?” Instead we should ask “Which blend has the most body?” Or if strength is really what we’re after, then it comes down to how we brew our coffee, and since we are the barista, that's up to us.
