Coffee

I'm damn close to being almost the exact opposite side of the planet lol; I'm in Vancouver, on West Coast of Canada.

/r/coffee has had several conversations about coffee that's 'overseas' to my perspective, and I'm pretty sure Community Coffee has come up every time Western Aus does. To my impression, they're effectively one of the biggest names on your half of your continent, I can only name two other WA roasters off the top of my head, and one of those solely because they spent a couple years spamming /coffee - the other guys that I know about more positively is Five Senses, out of Perth / Port Kennedy area? Their name comes up online from time to time, but I have a friend that worked in their cafe while she was down there on a gap year.

Espresso is probably the one major venue that medium-dark still gets playtime up here; I think my local peers and cafe owners here have finally started working out that the execution threshold on light and very-light roasts is so astronomically high that it's not a consistently positive experience in cafes - only in the last five years or so have I stopped needing to worry that each new Specialty cafe I tried might serve me some battery-acid shot of ultra-light single origin that only the owner can actually do a good job with.

it's an interesting observation that speciality coffee ignores darker roasts. I reckon there will be a revolt against light roasts soon as people start to explore what makes good dark roast.

I wouldn't say strictly ignores, so much as undervalues. While I think there's some very good reasons underlying some of the attitude towards darker roasts in modern Specialty, I think that a lot of those reasons and the attitude itself are exaggerated for cultural rather than coffee-factual reasons. NA & EU Specialty movements started as a culture defined by what they weren't - as a movement 'in opposition to' what was popular and common in the coffee industry and among coffee consumers in the time Specialty started. And a lot of what was popular at the time was dark roasts - so "we" did light roasts of nice beans that dark roasting was bad for because we are special people making special coffee in special ways, not like those filthy casuals making boring normal coffee with dark roasts and cheap beans. ...I hope that reads as satire and not genuine...

I don't think we're likely to have a revolt against lighter roasts. I think some of the stigma around some darker roasting is fading over time, I think there are some specialty businesses more willing to embrace and experiment with darker roasting, but the label of dark is largely left out of the question - the closest we see to a real 'revolt' is against roast levels as a metric, in abstract. Roasters are increasingly likely to let experimentation and profiling take roasts darker and lighter without the roaster checking the 'roast level' or using it to determine their goals. Some roasting of coffees that are flattered by darker roasting has trended darker, but less as a conscious thing and more that the sample roast runs indicate 5° hotter and 1:00 longer are positive changes to the coffee.

As worthwhile detour, I know that our "roast levels" and yours aren't consistently 1:1; my impression has been that your typical roasting range is over a narrower spread - your light roasts are darker, your dark roasts are lighter - than ours typically is, so when NA or EU is talking about "dark" that's generally going pretty close to black, clear expressed oils like a day or two after roast, and almost inevitable "drum" or "heat" notes in the cup. That starting point is a huge portion of why there are those attitudes - that is a foundation that's very hard to build or find quality within.

I don't think I'm a loud enough voice in NA today to take credit, but I've been banging on for years now that Specialty is missing how much depth and space for excellence in roasting and beans exists at med-dark levels, because Specialty companies explicitly doing "dark roasts" or med-darks were typically either using top-shelf light roast beans and just roasting them dark, or buying something cheap and average and doing a very boring roast with relatively little QA. While I was roasting I had several peers confess that their dark product was kind of phoned-in because they and their team hated cupping the dark batches. And I'm like ... but you're getting paid to?

That said, in their defense - it does require different skills and developing a different palate from what Specialty normally asks for in cupping light and medium roasts of "our" beans, though; it was a lot of work that I also didn't enjoy very much to learn what to look for and how to iterate cupping QA for darker roasts, and to develop a palate adequate to realize and explore that there are differences among beans and what they bring, even at roasts dark enough Specialty wisdom says there's no origin traits left.