Stumptown Coffee Scales Explained

Stumptown has a broad range of coffees to suit many preferences and desires for your favorite cup. We provide tasting notes alongside each coffee to capture the key flavor characteristics inherent to each coffee, and we recently added new descriptive scales to better capture the experience of drinking each coffee. Once you dip your toes into our system, you should be able to find a coffee and roast that is perfect for you.

In order to help you along this path, we’ve rolled out a new guide to categorize and communicate flavor profiles more consistently. You’ll see a scale describing three different characteristics of each coffee: Roast level, Acidity, and Intensity.

• Roast Level: Degree of roast influencing sweetness, body, acidity/vibrancy, and aroma.
• Acidity: Brightness and perceived acidity, ranging from soft and subtle to lively and bright.
• Intensity: Overall level of strength of flavors, mouthfeel, and aftertaste.

Let’s dig into each of these categories to learn more!

Roast Levels

Definition: How far the beans are roasted, affecting sweetness, body, acidity, and color. Industry wide, there is actually no single definition of a light, medium, or dark roast. Confusing, we know!  So, these scales and ratings are relative to Stumptown's philosophy on roast. We tend to roast at a medium roast level where perceived sweetness, acidity and bitters are in balanced harmony.

You’ll see the scale runs from Light & Bright to Dark & Bittersweet. Here is a breakdown of what to expect from one end of the spectrum to the other:

• Light Roast: focused on more intense vibrant acidity, but with enough perceived sweetness to balance the profile. Often a lighter bodied texture. Ex: lemony bright, sweet tea
• Medium Light Roast: Bright and vibrant acidity, but with a little more emphasis on balanced sweetness and a little more body. Ex: Melon-like acidity, honey sweetness
• Medium Roast: A medium roast where perceived acidity, sweetness and body are in balanced harmony. Ex: Candied citrus, berry, milk chocolate, cola
• Full Medium: A darker medium roast with mellowed acidity, and an emphasis on sweetness and more body. Ex: Cherry jam, fudge, brown sugar
• Dark Roast: little or no acidity, emphasis of browned sugar sweetness and more forward roast flavors. Ex: Dark chocolate, toasted marshmallow, toffee

Acidity

Definition: The perceived level of vibrancy, or brightness of acidity. Note, regular brewed coffee is mostly water, so pH levels are typically very close to water, or neutral. However, certain perceived taste notes can give the impression of acidic and bright flavors. Lighter roasts can often give the impression of acidity, but so can a medium or medium dark roast where the coffee has a high level of perceived acidity. This also means a lighter roast coffee with low inherent acidity can taste mellow and not especially vibrant, or bright.

The scale for Acidity runs from Soft & Subtle to Crisp & Bright; here is a bit more explanation:

• Low : The perceived acidity doesn’t pack a punch, and sweetness is typically more forward in the flavor profile. Ex: Sweet tea, dried fruit and fudge
• Medium: A level of perceived acidity that is balanced and equal to perceived sweetness. Ex: Cola, navel orange, milk chocolate
• High: High level of perceived acidity and vibrancy. These are bright coffees where acidity stands out more than sweetness. Ex: Lemon-lime, black tea, cane sugar

Intensity

Definition: The overall impact of body, or texture, and depth, or concentration of flavors. How pronounced the cup feels on the palate, and how intense the flavors are.

Let’s dig into the intensity scale, which runs from Mellow to Bold:

• Low Intensity: Subtle and tea-like flavor. Easy drinking on its own. 
• Medium Intensity: Noticeable presence of well-balanced flavors. Great on its own, but just as enjoyable with milk. Flavors may be overwhelmed by heavy cream, or flavorings.
• High Intensity: Forward flavors and often a heavier texture. Taste notes will show through heavy cream, or flavorings. 

Our definitions are subject to our wealth of experience with roasting and tasting our coffees. Companies differ on their definition of roast levels, acidity and intensity, but our roasting and quality analysts have three decades of experience, and taste our coffees daily and year round.