By KATY MCLAUGHLIN

After years of convincing the nation’s coffee drinkers that dark-roasted brews are the classiest thing to fill a mug or takeout cup, Starbucks, Peet’s, and a new wave of high-end chains are rolling out the exact opposite: light-roasted coffee.

Dark-roasted coffee is getting competition from a new rival, the lighter roast. Katy McLaughlin reports on Lunch Break. Photo: AP.

The Hot Blonde in the Coffee Shop: A Lighter Roast

The target customers for the new style of coffee are people like Jackie Russell, a retired school administrator in Los Angeles. Ms. Russell’s son Ted Russell is something of a coffee connoisseur, who has shared his passion for Peet’s dark-roasted coffee with his mother. Only problem: She hates it.

“It’s really just a terrible taste to me. It almost tastes like something that has burned,” says Ms. Russell.

To capture customers like Ms. Russell, Starbucks Corp. in January introduced Blonde Roast, a light-roasted blend now sold in the chain’s 10,787 U.S. stores and which will be stocked in grocery stores this week. Peet’s Coffee Tea will roll out two “medium roast” blends in its 197 stores late next month. It introduced the lighter-roasted beans in 6,400 grocery stores in July.

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F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

More lightly roasted varieties of coffee are coming to coffee shops, cafés and grocery shelves. Dark roasting brings out more of the natural oils in the bean, making them look shinier than the lighter roasts. 1. Dark ‘Espresso Roast’ from Tully’s. 2. Tully’s light roast Breakfast Blend. 3. Peet’s dark French roast. 4. Medium roasted ‘Café Domingo’ from Peet’s. 5. Starbucks’s Medium House Blend. 6. Starbucks’s Blonde Veranda Blend.

A raft of new high-end cafes and coffee roasters, including Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago and Los Angeles, Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in New York and San Francisco, Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco, and Handsome Coffee Roasters in Los Angeles, take the embrace of light roast even further: They only sell light-roasted coffee and say that dark roasting is tantamount to ruining good coffee.

Coffee companies are doing well as demand grows world-wide, though the economic downturn slowed expansion in the U.S., analysts say.This drove firms to conjure up additional products—including light roasts—to draw in new customers and sell more to their regulars.

It’s a dramatic turn for the specialty coffee industry, which began expanding rapidly 20 years ago. This new coffee differed from what Americans were used to with its strong, bold, deep taste—partly the result of dark-roasted beans. Many coffee snobs say they can only drink the dark brews at Starbucks or Peet’s, and that anything else tastes like dishwater.

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

Coffee companies are looking to sell lighter roasts to home grinders and brewers, as well as to sit-down patrons at their cafés.

U.S. coffee drinkers may tend to think of dark roast as European and sophisticated. However, light-roasted coffee, brewed strong, is the norm in Northern Europe, including Germany and Scandinavia. Many high-end roasters today are working to convince customers that light roasting is the best way to coax the delicate, nuanced flavors out of high quality beans.

“When it is dark, you taste charcoal, the same charcoal that’s on a piece of toast,” says Jeremy Tooker, owner of Four Barrel. “We’re trying to show you the reasons why you bought the coffee,” by light roasting and letting subtle flavors emerge.

Those are fighting words for die-hard dark-roasted coffee fans and companies that popularized these bold brews.

“While it is true you can roast a coffee to the point that you annihilate the flavor if you don’t do it correctly, our approach is to balance the origin with the flavor of the roast,” says Andrew Linnemann, director of coffee quality at Starbucks. The company rolled out Blonde Roast after a growing number of customers asked the stores’ baristas and commented on the company website that they wanted lighter-roasted beans.

Starbucks also conducted a study last year using an online questionnaire as well as taste tests in which people sampled coffee roasted to different degrees of darkness. The company says 42% prefer a lighter roast. Starbucks chose the term “blonde” because “light” can “infer that something has been removed” or might confuse consumers who think of light coffee as having milk added, a spokeswoman says. Plenty of customers still prefer darker roasted beans, but now they have a choice, the company says.

Tully’s Coffee, a unit of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc., asks consumers on its website to first identify their preferred roasting style, and then suggests suitable coffees.

One company that is strongly associated with dark roasting is Peet’s, a specialty coffee pioneer based in Emeryville, Calif. Its “medium roast” offers customers a choice, but Peet’s isn’t saying lighter roasting is better.

“It is quality that matters,” not roasting style, says Doug Welsh, Peet’s vice president of coffee.

Coffee roasting is a complex craft, and the industry has no consumer-friendly metric to identify how light or dark beans have been roasted.

Depending on the bean varietal, origin, density and the desired result, beans can spend as little as nine minutes at 400 degrees or as much as 16 minutes at 440 degrees, says George Howell, founder of Acton, Mass.-based George Howell Coffee Co., which sells light-roasted beans wholesale and over the Internet. Very dark roasted beans emerge from the process a dark-brown color and release some of their oils to the surface. Light roasted beans can be a light wood color and aren’t oily.

A shift in the coffee market has made it easier for roasters to buy directly from Latin American and African growers that produce the most desirable beans. Until a decade or so ago, anything besides beans from various producers blended together on the commodity market was tough to get. Specialty coffee sellers relied on dark roasting to coax maximum flavor out of beans that could be of middling quality.

Roasters disagree on which style is harder to do well. When poorly done, light roasting can leave beans tasting grassy and raw, while subpar dark-roasting can leave them tasting ashy and burned. Roasting style doesn’t affect caffeine content appreciably and dark-roasted coffee doesn’t provide more “buzz” than light. But because the flavor lingers in the mouth longer, some drinkers mistakenly believe that darker brews have more caffeine, said Mr. Linnemann of Starbucks.

Intelligentsia sells $19, 12-ounce bags of Anjilanaka organic beans from Bolivia, which boast hints of “white grape, honey and apple skin,” the website says, while Blue Bottle’s $18 Sidamo Taramessa comes from a cooperative farm in Ethiopia and tastes “punchy,” “winy” and “leathery,” the company says. These subtleties—along with the point of paying top dollar for the beans—would be obliterated by heavy roasting, the companies say.

“If we lined up five coffees from different regions and roasted them dark, then none of us could pick them out of a lineup,” says Tyler Wells, chief executive of Handsome, which sells coffee wholesale. Because quality beans, properly roasted retain more natural sweetness, Mr. Wells says that he won’t offer sugar when he opens his first café in February. He adds he has served thousands of coffees at events and has never offered sugar, to the consternation of some consumers.

Many consumers erroneously associate dark-roasted coffee with “strong” coffee, Mr. Howell says.

“Strength is a matter of how much coffee to water,” he says. While some drinkers enjoy the flavorful jolt of a dark coffee, “light roast rewards waiting a little bit, like letting a wine open after it has been poured,” and can taste even better as it cools, Mr. Howell says. Light roasts are best enjoyed without cream or sugar because they can be naturally sweet and not bitter, he adds.

Both Peet’s and Starbucks say their new roasts are bringing in new customers and getting more espresso-drink buyers to purchase beans for brewing at home. Mr. Russell reckons his mother is Starbucks’s target customer for Blonde Roast.

“I’m planning to give her a bag soon,” Mr. Russell says.

Write to Katy McLaughlin at [email protected]

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