I don't know if anyone else has noticed but getting hold of good mild and medium roasted coffee in NZ is almost impossible.
Of all the things wrong with my household when I was growing up coffee wasn't one of them.
We had fresh coffee, a grinder and a perculator in the early 70s. The beans came from a Chch company Browne and Heaton, the only South Island (non corporate) roaster in those days. I remember when I was 11 trying an experiment where I had a flask of coffee and didn't go to sleep. I think I just about fainted on a bus in town and the rest is a blur.
What was nice about that coffee was that it packed a punch but wasn't bitter.
Years later when the coffee revolution started I bought the darkest and dirtiest coffee I could. In my early 20s I would get the nastiest blackest roasts and inflict them on anyone who came near. In my time on the front line as a barrista I started to soften that expectation and experiment with flavour.
By the time I hit 30 I knew that coffee can have a milder roast, the same caffeine levels and have a subtelty of flavour and a richness of many layers.
What struck me is that most coffee beans and grounds on sale are as darkly roasted as possible. In fact they are sometimes roasted to be bitter (or perhaps those suppliers don't know what they are doing) and as black as is possible.
Why, why? I kept asking myself..... until I noticed that most coffee businesses were set up by young men.
Why is so much of our coffee agressive and lacking in subtelty? Because the rosters are.
It's all academic for me now. I stopped drinking coffee a year ago, partly due to a medical 'thing' and partly as I couldn't find coffee I like.
But I think we need more sober drivers making coffee, and an ad campaign 'Only a bloody idiot burns coffee beans'.
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