The rapid proliferation of roasters who, through self-identification or external attribution, may be categorized as ultralight, in conjunction with an ostensible change in taste preferences and tolerances amongst consumers of speciality coffee, I think, merits a rigorous treatment of what “ultralight” could mean on the basis of conceptual necessity. Let’s proceed!
The ubiquity of coffee gear has played no small part in the fetishization of the physicotechnical aspects of coffee, e.g., equipment inputs within a brew recipe, devices for the quantitative measurement of roast and brew outcomes, etc. These are surely significant aspects of producing a roast/cup, yet they can scarcely merit, in themselves, the attribution of special powers with respect to cup or roast outcomes. The supposed communicability of a brew or coffee’s objective features can produce the segmentation of what may deemed physical from the subjective determinations of taste or agreeableness that necessarily formulate our judgment of the cup or the roast. In this case, the token, discrete measures, foreclose the imminent recognition of its conditions of possibility, the pre-experiential, subjective criteria, which qualitatively ground the quantitative token in the first place. This is a long and dense way of saying that it is possible that the exchange of certain precise measures may obscure rather than clarify the semantic sphere that we are trying to access. Hence, the circulation of agtron measures for roast may not just be “unhelpful” due to the varying protocols amongst users, differences in the physical equipment, and so forth, but pernicious for its forgetfulness of the discourse between the qualities of the object and our cognition of the object in experience.
In effect, I am arguing that drinking coffee is chiefly an aesthetic experience; this being the case, the discourse around the physical aspects of coffee logically imply the relation to our subjective faculties of cognition. It is the interaction between the two that most adequately represents (roasted) coffee, as such. Evidently, this logical implication neither physically nor intellectually necessitates the manifest content of our discourse.
Accounting for roast level, including ultralight, through a discourse of outer bean color, agtron numbers, and QC brew extraction will obviously not reflect the way that beans taste. Once more, it is the judgment that combines the object with our cognition of the object which matters here. I am, therefore, not advocating for the disposal of our various measures of an object’s physical qualities but an understanding that privileges the relation through which judgment is formed over its relata.
This may all sound relatively standard. What then is the worthwhile contribution here?
My advocacy for qualifying ultralight is to assess the aspirations of those who are roasting, i.e., consider how the roaster thinks about what they are doing to a given bean and what they want to do with it. There are a variety of terms that may indicate where the roaster’s aspiration lies, which, all together, in relation to our experience, synthesize what we may aptly judge as being the level of ultralight. Moreover, different green will require different approaches and levels of “development” to avoid expressions that we, as consumers and as roasters, presently deem to be entirely undesirable. Thus, when we do taste a given roast and find that it does not correspond closely enough with what we imagine should proceed from the stated aspiration of the roaster, we ought to be wary of casting an ill-begotten conclusion. Just as one swallow does not make a summer’s day, one bag does not make a roaster’s level of roast/development. What is, therefore, required of us within the speciality coffee domain is a degree of rational faith regarding the existence of consistency between our own faculty of judgment and that of the roaster. This need not be so gratuitous as to posit exact or even near resemblance of our own faculty and that of others but only what would minimally enable communication of experience in the first place.
My proposal here does not venture to eliminate all of what is nebulous about ultralight as a roast level, nor any level of roasting for that matter. Rather, I hope this this (semi)-formal treatment and reframing provides the fertile terroir upon which rigorous discussion may flourish and fruit.
Desipere aude!