Mariposa Coffee Roastery

If you’ve been following us, you’ll know we’ve in a way created a type of signature for ourselves. We mentioned it in a blog post in the past but believe that this is definitely one highlight that makes us unique.

Aside from our commitment to roast your coffee to order in small batch artisan roasts, we also tend to roast our coffees lighter than most places. What this means is that we don’t roast all our coffees lighter, but our “roasting threshold” is generally not as dark as other roasters. Read further for our explanation.

Roasting coffee is almost like an art form. During roasting, a lot of involvement is required on the roaster’s end, it is mostly sensory intensive. Not only is experience needed to know where to start and how much coffee to use for each batch, but as a coffee progresses in it’s roast, it develops many different levels of smell, change in color, and sound. A very important and obvious change in coffee is it’s color. Many times, roast color will determine the type of taste notes the coffee will produce. So, one coffee bean, an Ethiopia Yirgacheffe for example, will taste very different when roasted light verses roasted dark – this is generally true for all coffee.

So, why lighter? Well, first of all, we are firm believers that the customer should have an input on what tastes good and what doesn’t. So, we try to accommodate everyone’s tastes and desires, while keeping our philosophy true. Coffee that is generally roasted lighter will contain more flavor and each bean’s uniqueness is highlighted when roasted lighter. We look to provide that unique taste characteristic of the coffee. In short, the darker you get, more oils and sugars are burned out, and well, it all starts to taste the same: “burnt, full-bodied, and smokey.” If all coffee were roasted dark, there’s no point in having so many different regions and varieties.

Our emphasis is that every coffee we roast, we highlight the best taste characteristic so you are able to experience the coffee’s true self.

Now, that doesn’t mean we don’t have dark coffees. Our Sumatra Gayo, Decaf Colombia, Vintage Blend, and Benvenuti’s Blend #2  are all roasted dark. How dark? Let’s just say, it’s dark enough to ensure that the best flavors are highlighted and you’re not jipped out of your pleasant coffee drinking experience. It all depends on the coffee, but we will never substitute the reason to roast dark just because we have a sub-par coffee bean. We ensure two things when it comes down to our coffee: (1) it’s specialty arabica grade, and (2) it is able to handle a variety of roast levels without compromising quality.