Tales from the Dark Side: A reason to go into the light, roast.

The blog post today was written by Brian Anderson!!  

A few nights ago, I was at my friends apartment and he offered me a cup of coffee, As he poured the coffee into my mug, he told me how much he liked this particular brand; In his opinion, it was "strong." perhaps, dare i say it "BOLD".
In my many years of working in the coffee industry, I have heard many people praise strong coffee for various reasons and I get it. If you have to wake up early in the morning, you want something that will lift your eyelids so you can actually see when you are driving to work or conversely if you have to stay up late and you want something to prevent you from slamming your sleepy head into the pages of your textbook--you want strong coffee. But what does that mean? Dark Roast? Strong Flavor? Lots of caffeine? A combination of all three?
Many people have the misconception that bitter coffees have a lot of caffeine. This notion seems logical because caffeine does indeed have a bitter taste. Besides, everybody knows that things that make you feel better always leave a bitter taste in your mouth-- medicine, exercise, paychecks (work). Luckily, only 15% of the bitterness of coffee actually comes from caffeine: the roasting process accounts for the other 85% . The longer that coffee is roasted, the more bitter it becomes.
What does this mean in terms of your weary existence?
It means that you don't have to drink bitter coffee to get your caffeine fix.
Dark roasted coffees, as a matter of fact not only produce bitter flavor, but actually contain less caffeine. Let me explain. Caffeine is water soluble, which means in layman's terms, that caffeine and water are fond of each other: they are like two peas in a pod. What happens to one, happens to the other. When coffee beans (seeds) are roasted, water and caffeine molecules leave together in the form of vapor. Darker roasts mean less water content, which means less caffeine: the worst of both worlds--bitter flavor and less caffeine.
If you really want to feel the kick from caffeine, drink lighter roasts and do not drink coffee in large quantities. Large doses of caffeine condition your brain to work when it receives increasingly bigger doses. To keep your caffeine buzz going, your energy level high, and your attention to detail on point, drink small amounts of coffee throughout the day. Besides are you really going to down 20 ounces of coffee before it gets cold? If you are, coffee may be the least of your problems. 

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