If you want to get even deeper into this topic, I recommend checking out this article on Daily Coffee News. While a light roast bean and dark roast bean may have the same amount of caffeine, when you look at the finished brew, there may be negligible smidgen more caffeine in a dark roast simply because there’s less of other stuff in there. But, one thing that doesn’t change at these roast levels is caffeine. Can you get the same nutritional value from each? (Maybe? I’m not a scientist.) It seems likely and logical that dark roasts are slightly less soluble (there’s much less stuff to dissolve less flavors, things have degraded and changed, etc.). So, what is actually dissolvable in a coffee? And does it change from a light roast to a dark roast? Well, does burnt toast taste different than perfectly golden toast? (Yes). Most coffees, whether they’re light or dark roasts, actually have the same amount of caffeine. Caffeine content is actually correlated to coffee varieties (each plant will have a slightly different level of the chemical). Coffee displayed here is a light roast, as seen by intact cellulose center and light brown coloration. So, if you had a light roast bean and a dark roasted bean of the same coffee, per volume, it would likely have a comparable amount of caffeine, right? A finished roast cooling off in the cooling tray of our 5kg US Roaster. Logic would tell us that the bean often does not get up to a high enough temperature to cause the caffeine to degrade. For example, Mission Coffee’s darkest roasts are lucky to get up to 430 degrees Fahrenheit. We also know that caffeine does not begin to degrade until around 455 degrees Fahrenheit (e.g., it’s stable and not breaking apart). So, we know that caffeine is a naturally occurring stimulant. The caffeine overstimulates the bugs, paralyzing them, and preventing them from further damaging the plant (pretty ‘effin cool defense mechanism, if you ask me!). The plant uses this to defend itself from many different pests. We obviously know that caffeine is a stimulant. Do you know why coffee has caffeine? It’s a feature that was naturally selected over the years. The flavors also change via maillard and Strecker reactions (really cool and complex non-enzymatic reactions that I won’t spend much time on here, but if you want to learn more, I suggest checking this TED video about chocolate chip cookieschange at different temperatures.) One thing we fail to look at (or adequately explain) is what happens to the caffeine inside of the coffee bean. The beans’ color changes quite a bit, from green to yellow to light brown to deep brown to black. You'll find this guy at our Roasting Annex. Closeup of our tried and true 5kg US Roaster Corps. We typically crank up the temperature hotter than 400 degrees Fahrenheit while we’re at it. During the roasting process, we take raw (green) coffee from room temperature and modulate the flavor and profiles of the bean over 9–14 minutes. But are they right about that? Let’s look at the science of roasting and see if this checks out-or if it’s just an urban coffee myth. In fact, I often hear people order light roast coffee because they believe it’ll promise more of that boost. We get this question a lot: Do light roasts have more caffeine than dark roasts? There’s so much misinformation out there, folks are never quite sure what’s true and what’s not.
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