Consider the last time you bought a bag of coffee. Perhaps its wrong of me to assume, but would I be correct in guessing the coffee you purchased was a dark roast?

Most of the coffee available to the home consumer today is a dark roast. And by watching coffee commercials and reading the ads, without hesitation, one would easily believe the dark roast is, by far, a superior coffee. But when it comes to the roast of your coffee, while a great deal of it simply has to do with personal taste, dont believe mass marketing that says the dark roast is the ultimate expression of quality coffee. Its not. In fact, its often quite the opposite.

There are reasons the dark roast has become so popular. For one thing, the coffee industry is extremely large. Its the second most-highly traded commodity next to oil. Just think of the massive volume of coffee that hits the consuming market each year. Then consider this: only 10 percent of that coffee qualifies as excellent in quality. The remaining 90 percent is considered somewhere between average to poor. Meaning theres nothing very special about it, no inherent flavors that set it apart from any other coffee. And if there are intriguing flavors, most likely they arent desirable. For instance, a typical low-grown Robusta coffee can taste medicinal, even rubbery.

So, if so much of the coffee grown is of mediocre quality, why is it that people so happily consume so much each and every day? The answer: The Ubiquitous Dark Roast. (Well, and a lot of cream and sugar too. Ill cover that some other time.)

Dark roast simply means that the coffee bean has been roasted to a higher temperature and typically for a longer period of time. This process causes all of the flavor molecules stored within the coffee beansboth the good and bad flavorsto be burnt away. By roasting so dark, the end consumer (you) cant tell whether its a good bean or a bad bean because all the natural flavors have been turned to charcoal.

Think of it this way: a fine filet mignon and a strip of utility beef; if theyve both been very overcooked, even a culinary expert would never be able to tell the difference between the two. Same with coffee.

So if youre a large coffee company, what do you do? You roast dark, then, market the heck out of it and try to convince the mass market that its a wonderfully rich and complex coffee. Now you cant really blame them can you? What else are they supposed to do, admit why theyre roasting your coffee so dark?

Not to be misunderstood, Im not saying a dark-roasted coffee is always poor quality. There are some wonderful dark roast single-origin coffees and blends out there. Just dont assume the dark roast is as rich and flavorful as many roasters say it is. Most of the time there is a reason its roasted so dark.

Instead of going with a dark roast next time youre picking up your bag of coffee, consider trying a freshly-roasted bag of something slightly lighter, perhaps a city roast or even a full city roast (almost a dark roast) if youre not wanting to leap into lightness with reckless abandon. When shopping, keep in mind that the lighter the roast, the more confidence the roaster is showing in the quality of the raw bean.