What Is the Difference Between Colombian & French Roast Coffee?
The number of choices on your local coffee shop's menu board seems to get longer by the day. As the menu grows, so does your confusion about what you are drinking and how that drink will taste. Regardless of what you put in your coffee, nothing affects the taste of that cup of joe more than the roast of the coffee beans themselves. Does this Spark an idea?
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The Coffee Plant
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Coffee beans are the seeds contained within the cherries of a coffee plant. After coffee producers harvest the cherries, they remove the flesh of the cherry and ferment and dry the beans. These dried beans--known as green coffee--then undergo a process called roasting to allow flavor, acidity and body of the coffee to develop fully.
Coffee Roasting
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Coffee producers roast the green coffee beans at varying temperatures and lengths of time. As the green coffee spends more time in the roaster, it becomes darker and releases more and more of its essential oils. The amount of time the coffee bean spends in the roaster is referred to as degrees of roasting.
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Degrees of Roasting
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Medium roasted coffee beans. The green beans that are roasted undergo physical and chemical changes, producing the many different types of coffee roasts. Although there is no official naming for the degrees of coffee roasting, the standard generally is: light, medium light, medium, medium dark, dark and very dark. These degrees of roasting change the final product in both flavor and body, allowing coffee roasters to experiment with different roasting combinations to produce the optimal amount of flavor and body for a certain bean.
French Roast Coffee
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Very dark French roasted coffee beans. French roast coffee is another term for the very dark degree of coffee roasting. The beans of a French roast coffee appear dark black in color and oily, as most of the essential oils have leeched from the bean. The type of coffee bean used in French roast matters very little due to the taste of the bean being reduced to a smoky flavor. French roast coffees are used mainly for espresso drinks.
Colombian Coffee
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Colombian coffee refers only to the type of coffee bean that is grown in Columbia and the surrounding region. Colombian coffee that is grown outside of the region is still referred to as Colombian coffee, as long as it originated from the region. There is no roast degree that is referred to as Colombian. Colombian coffee may be roasted to any degree, including French roast, but is commonly roasted to a medium degree. This allows the producer of the coffee to extract the most amount of flavor from this popular type of coffee bean.
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- Photo Credit Coffee grinder image by NBo from Fotolia.com coffee beans image by The Blowfish Inc from Fotolia.com coffee beans image by JJAVA from Fotolia.com
