White Coffee, the Roast

For many, “White Coffee” means the opposite of black coffee - a coffee drink with lots of milk. For others, it’s coffee made from beans that were barely roasted – roasted only to a tan color. In fact, this is something you might imagine finding at a raw foods restaurant, since the beans are so barely roasted as to be almost raw. Rose Tosti wrote a couple of articles on this not very common roast. Her latest, in the Seattle Weekly, describes her experience at a Seattle coffee shop which sells drinks brewed with white coffee beans. She says people, in many cases students, drink this for the excessive caffeine content. The high content is due to the light roast, because beans lose caffeine in the roasting process, so the darker they’re roasted, the lower the caffeine content. If you need to stay awake though, this is one way to do it. Tosti didn’t describe the taste of the coffee, merely stating that her experience the last time was not worth repeating. It was pointed out that the beans remained very hard and would likely necessitate a very heavy duty grinder. Another writer described the taste as somewhat nutty. It seems to call for a good deal of sugar, in an effort to add more taste. It will be interesting to see if this coffee takes off.