Light vs. Medium vs. Dark Roast: Which Should You Buy?

When people join Siip, we ask them a simple question: which roast do you like? Six in ten say medium.

Then they start rating the coffee they actually drink, and over time a different answer emerges. The roast they love most often is not medium at all. It is light.

So which roast should you buy? The short version is that light roast tastes more of the coffee itself and dark roast tastes more of the roast, with medium somewhere in between. If you are not sure which one is yours, buy a light-medium roast and taste it next to your usual bag. You may be surprised by which one you reach for.

What's the difference between light, medium and dark roast?

Roasting is a matter of heat and time. The longer a coffee stays in the roaster, the more it tastes of the roast itself and the less it tastes of the place where it was grown.

These are tendencies rather than rules. Where a coffee comes from and how it was processed shape the cup just as much as the roast does.

Which roast should you buy?

• If you drink your coffee black and like fruity or tea-like cups, choose a light or light-medium roast.
• If you like chocolate and nut flavors or you add milk, choose a medium or medium-dark roast. Medium-dark is loved a little more often than medium in Siip ratings: 36% compared with 33%.
• If you are not sure, buy one light-medium roast alongside your usual medium and brew them the same way. Then rate both.

Two ratings of your own will tell you more than anyone else's average.

What Siip ratings show

Every time someone finishes a coffee, the Siip app asks a single question: how was it? The chart below shows how people answered for each roast.

Lighter roasts are loved more often. For medium roast 33% of ratings are "I loved it," and that share rises to 39% for light-medium and 43% for light. Light roast also draws the fewest low ratings: 13% compared with 18% for medium and 20% for dark.

Medium is the default but not the favorite. It is the roast most people say they prefer and it has more ratings than any other. It also has the lowest share of ratings that are loved.

Your roast is not the average. When we compared people who had rated both light and medium roasts, 54% scored their light roasts higher. But 35% went the other way, which is more than one in three. As one rater put it:

"Fantastic range of fruity flavors, although a little too light for me. I did however enjoy the tea-like quality of it."

A Siip rater, on a light-roast Ethiopian coffee

Does light roast have more caffeine?

Not reliably. Roasting destroys very little caffeine, so the answer depends on how you measure. Some tests find a little more caffeine in a scoop of light roast, because its denser beans pack more coffee into the same spoon. Others measure by weight and find more in dark roast.

Either way the difference is small next to the things you control, such as how much coffee you use and how you brew it. Dark roast tastes stronger but it does not reliably contain more caffeine.

Find your own roast

At Siip we don't think there is a best roast. There is only the roast you love, and the surest way to find it is to taste a few and keep track of what you thought.

That is what the Siip app is for. Every rating you add updates your own taste profile, and every coffee you scan gets a match score made for you. The same profile is what a Siip subscription uses to choose your coffee. When subscribers rated the coffees we sent them in their subscription boxes, they liked or loved 86% of the coffees in their fourth box. Across all coffees rated in the Siip app, that share is 76%.

Frequently Asked Questions