I only recently started home roasting.
I have noticed, which I have also read, that City - Full City brings out the most flavor notes of the beans. From my limited experience as well as from the images of on the web beans roasted to those levels are much lighter than anything I have seen in stores, including places like fresh market where they offer a wide variety of roasted bean in barrels, other grocery stores as well as the only local artisan pro roaster that we have in town. Everything offered by these pros are quite a bit darker than my roasts & honestly do not really have the flavor notes that I can taste in my roasts.

I'm actually a little baffled by this. Do the pros do something different or do the vast majority of people want dark roasts with less flavor? Maybe that why flavored beans are so popular.

You're buying beans from the wrong roasters...If you want light give Heart or George Howell a try.

Honestly, it's hard for me to call the fresh market roaster a "pro"

Don't they just put beans in an air roaster, press a button, and then drop them...I may be wrong

Depends on what you mean by "pros". Most of the old guys, like from the 80s and 90s roasted dark. And it was really good. Now the trend is lighter. One is not better than the other, just a difference in taste. And the average consumer of specialty coffee seems to prefer darker. Dark can be very good, if you do it well. So can light - if you do it well.

jwalter007 wrote:I only recently started home roasting.
I have noticed, which I have also read, that City - Full City brings out the most flavor notes of the beans. From my limited experience as well as from the images of on the web beans roasted to those levels are much lighter than anything I have seen in stores, including places like fresh market where they offer a wide variety of roasted bean in barrels, other grocery stores as well as the only local artisan pro roaster that we have in town. Everything offered by these pros are quite a bit darker than my roasts & honestly do not really have the flavor notes that I can taste in my roasts.

I have been to my local Fresh Market store. Yes, they have tons of very dark roasted coffee in barrels - it is pretty bad stuff. I actually talked to the coffee person there, and they did not have a clue. They had very little instructions / experience / knowledge about how to roast coffee. I quickly decided not to try and enlighten them.

Whole Foods stores are not much better. Ours have fresh roasted coffee from several different local roasters, as well as their own in-house beans. There is only a single local roaster that puts the "date roasted" on the bag - Batdorf & Bronson. I never buy ANY coffee unless I know the date it was roasted.

That surprises me.
It seems that people, at least myself, dont really know what coffee should really taste like due to lack of proper selection in the retail world.
Since I posted this, I found Counter Culture which is a company local to my area, Raleigh. I found the bags for sale in our grocery store, Harris teeter as well as my fav eatery. I tried a bag. The color looked more like my roasts. Much lighter than anything I have seen besides my own roasts & the flavors were there.

My local shops almost all do light roasts unless it specifically a french roasted sumatra or what not, except La Colombe, but I was never impressed with their coffee.

Try Counter Culture, try inteligensia, try stumptown, try blue bottle. Many good roasters listed on this website. Red Bird is pretty inexpensive if you are ordering online.

My perspective is that it comes down to motivation and how you define "pro".

Those who are in the "coffee business" are just trying to sell something and will do whatever they think will sell the most right now and I wouldn't necessarily call them professional roasters regardless of how much they sell. They generally are over-roasting their coffee (my opinion of course) either because that's what they think people want or that's the only way to make their commodity greens drinkable.

Those who are passionate about coffee and just happen to have found an opportunity to make a living from roasting coffee (or hope to do so) roast in a way that excites them personally and they want to share it with the world. They're coffee professionals in my mind whether they're selling 1lb or 1,000lbs a week. I think generally they're doing something other than "darker roasts" because they're on the forefront of something exciting and they're sourcing great beans.