not really a cliche. that is why starbucks does it. they can cover up taste of poor beans especially when adding milk. most prefer a dark roast because corporations want to make profits and made our tastebuds lazy by force drinking it everyday. just like food with sweeteners or msg. it just kills the purpose of food as a craft. nowadays its even more the opposite there is an hipster revival of dark roast or msg hyping culture as marketing tool to sell it. but lets be homest those things are cache-misère
"poor beans": This is the first time that I heard that Starbucks has poor beans. Can you explain more? To be clear: I am not here to shill for Starbucks.
Also: What do you say about Italians drinking a cappuccino or macchiato (expresso shot with a splash of steamed milk)? From what I have seen while traveling in Italy, most Italians drink coffee at small coffee shops. Or French people drinking cafe latte?
I rarely drank coffee (or tea, although I do drink tea again, somewhat, nowadays).
I used to drink Indian-style milk tea almost daily, earlier, in school, college, and later.
So once, some years ago, when I walked into a Cafe Coffee Day [1] shop (an Indian coffee shop chain, possibly modeled on Starbucks), and after looking at the menu, ordered a macchiato. it was a pleasant surprise to find that it tasted very good. :)
(I had nothing against coffee, it was a common drink at home, growing up, the filter coffee [2] kind, but also Nescafe and Bru, just that I did not prefer it much, later.)
Like what you like, I think that is great. Some people really like dark roasted coffee. Nothing wrong with that, they aren't wrong/unsophisticated/whatever.
However, roasting coffee dark does homogenize the flavor of the coffee, and you do lose more and more of what that coffee tastes like. Coffees have a ton of different flavor compounds, and no two coffees are the same. There are quality issues and processing issues though that don't help to highlight this too, so it's hard to find coffee - even from people who know how to roast - that can shine in this way.
I think everyone should try a good coffee that has some punchy flavors - I'm not saying everyone should like it. It's a fun thing and should be experienced if you're interested.
You can make this argument for all cooking. You could even substitute "light roast" for "dark roast" in the above and it would read exactly the same. Why not brew raw coffee berries?
You can indeed make a (less absolute) form of this argument for all cooking:
Overcooking and adding a lot of spices makes everything (more or less) edible. With less cooking and less spices, you can better taste the original ingredients.
When you say "cooking" here, do you *only* mean roasting coffee beans? Or do you use the term "cooking" more generally? If specific, I agree with your point. If general, I would say that cooking proteins fundamentally changes the food and makes it more digestible (meat, fish, eggs, etc.).
And cooking fundamentally changes the food because cooking is a chemical and physical reaction caused by the heat on the food being cooked. Proteins get denatured, food gets softer or harder (depending upon the amount of liquid and heat added or removed), etc.
I am not a expert on the science of cooking, these are just my casual, slightly scientific observations as a layman :)
I mean, you can agree that there's a difference between raw beef, a rare steak, medium, well done, and carbonized, right? Same deal. Some people may prefer well done and maybe even carbonized, but you have to agree that when you cook a steak that much you lose a lot of what the meat can offer.
You should try green coffee and see what you think. Some roast on the coffee does enhance the flavor, make it more soluble, etc.. "underdeveloped" is definitely a thing.
I'm sure you will agree that raw beef and a steak taste differently?
open a starbucks bean bag and smell it. I dont know one person who would say that smells good.
also french coffee is horrible mostly because it is controlled by only one group in a mafia like fashion where they rent you the coffee machine but you have to buy their beans. italians can make good coffee with old espresso machines and average beans which says more about their skills than anything else.
They are completely right. You put it in flowery words by saying it adjusts the acidity profile of the coffee. When it literally destroys a bunch of flavor compounds and replaces them with burnt notes.
