I just made a cappuccino with Leam Hammer. It was a little too acidic to blend well with milk. It didn't quite curdle, but it tasted funky.

Denis wrote:Pictures are just pictures,

And your opinion is just your opinion, not an authority. Your pictures emphasize the problem even more, even without looking at the color differences, the bean development is very different in the samples, also the bean quality might have to do, Im surprised of the low quality of the Leuchtfeuer samples . Contrary to the picture of the Leam Hammer, your post confuses even more the topic of very, very, very light roasts. Thus again sends us back into the question you seem to claim authority on, what is a very light roast?

guydebord wrote:And your opinion is just your opinion, not an authority. Your pictures emphasize the problem even more, even without looking at the color differences, the bean development is very different in the samples, also the bean quality might have to do, Im surprised of the low quality of the Leuchtfeuer samples . Contrary to the picture of the Leam Hammer, your post confuses even more the topic of very, very, very light roasts. Thus again sends us back into the question you seem to claim authority on, what is a very light roast?

The Ethiopia in those photo is a special coffee that was raised at high altitude (2200m), low production and I agree the sorting is not the greatest. But they know what they did, coffee comes from Nordic Approach, and it scores 89 pts at LF and 91 pts at Gardelli. The taste is just out of this world, specially after 10 days post roast.

There are other coffee beans that have a way better sorting and appearance, but they don't taste as good. So again a matter of taste and subjectivity indeed. Here are some other beans roasted by LF. For me it's all about the taste, don't care about anything else.

Anybody opining from a pictures, about how light or dark a roast is, needs their heads examined, or at least a thirty second explanation of this new fangled invention called photography and exposure settings. Either take an agtron reading, or at a minimum, post the pics with a 50% grey card.

The Leam Hammer beans are still wrinkled, but no longer tan, so anybody with roasting experience knows they were pulled a minute or two into the first crack. That's a light roast. The traditional roasts from Harar and Yemen are pulled at the onset of the first crack, so the beans are still tan, But they produce a tea like beverage rather than anything normally regarded as coffee. I have seen them marketed as "white coffee"

These traditional roasts can be brewed on an espresso machine using flow control and a Turkish grind; but the result is still be a tea like drink, just more concentrated. If you want to label it espresso, I wish you a good Humpty Dumpty day.

There is a big difference between 1 minute or 2 after FC. Seems like you don't have a lot of experience in the underroasted/light coffee if you say that you obtain tea like beverages. A tea like beverage is a V60 or a cold brew.

This is my espresso out of ultra light beans. It looks tea like?
And if you wanna talk about espresso, and be all traditional then you have to stop pulling 1:2 ratios and start pulling traditional espresso shots.

My last results with mentioned Ethiopian beans looked like this. Coffee 9.7g, out 23.5g



Unfortunately I don't have a better photo, this one was taken from the video. Well, definitively not like traditional espresso, but taste was much closer to espresso than to tea and body not bad at all. Guy said it was roasted up to about 170°C

Please forgive the newbie question, but what was the origin of such an obsession for using ever lighter roasted beans? Why is this a goal in and of itself?

While it seems obvious that the old almost burned cheap coffee is best left to instant coffee drinkers, it it so clear that the lightest roasted coffee is necessarily the best, the tastiest?

Have we been off-track all these years roasting the damn seeds and not simply chewing on whole coffee cherries instead?

For me it isn't necessarily the best (this was discussed in other threads) ... problem is that quality coffee I can get from local roasters is relatively lightly roasted ... which is quite demanding for my cheap gear ...

Denis wrote: ... Seems like you don't have a lot of experience in the underroasted/light coffee ...

Obviously not

Too funny! Come on now Jim. Better start under roasting your home roasts so you can get up to speed.