Many of the great specialty coffees available today are actually blends of coffees from multiple regions. Blending is an important skill of the Master Coffee Roaster. Blends allow the Roaster to combine the best attributes of several different coffees to offer a more balanced or more complex flavor profile.

Roasting styles as well the names used to describe them can very widely. From Light or American to Medium or Full-City to Medium Dark or Espresso to Dark, French or Italian Roasts. The Master Roaster will often experiment with several different roast styles on the same beans, cupping each result before settling on the ideal roast profile.

Generally speaking, medium roasts are most appropriate for coffees that will be consumed black without milk or cream. Often a Darker roast is desirable when mixing in milk or cream so that the coffee flavor will stand-up to these sweeteners.

However, be wary of coffees that are available only in a Dark or French roast. These Coffees may be roasted to the extreme dark end of the spectrum simply to disguise the poor flavor characteristics of the beans with the smoky flavor of over-roasting.

As the term implies, decaffeination is the deliberate process of removing the naturally occurring caffeine from Coffee. In the past, the decaffeination process relied heavily on chemical solvents to remove the caffeine. More recently the Swiss Water Process was created to remove caffeine from green Coffee beans without the use of harsh chemicals and less impact to the natural flavors of the Coffee.

Decaffeination with water is a more expensive process then using solvents. But any process that is added to coffee production anywhere from the crop to the cup must add cost. This is why high quality Decaf Coffees cost more than regular Coffee of the same quality and origin.

This also explains why high quality Decaf was simply unavailable 20 years ago. Before the advent of Specialty Coffees, Decaf could not demand a higher retail price then regular Coffee. In order to offer Decaf at the same price point as regular Coffee, the extra cost of the decaffeination process must be offset somehow. The simplest way to offset this cost is to use lesser quality Coffee beans which of course will not brew the same quality in the cup.