Some like it strong

During my barista hustling days, customers often told me they liked their coffee strong.

I had no problem adjusting to customers’ needs, but found many people had different ideas of what “strong” meant. Some of the things strength commonly referred to was more caffeine, darker roast, or sometimes, just bitter coffee. These ideas aren’t necessarily wrong, but here in the coffee world, when we say “strong”, we mean the strength of flavours contained in an espresso.

Bitterness in coffee can result from a number of other things, like roasting profile, staleness, over-extraction, or not