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Best Light Roast Arabica Coffee Beans

Best Light Roast Arabica Coffee

Best Light Roast Arabica Coffee Beans: Recent years have found light roast arabica coffee beans growing in popularity. Rather than hiding behind the dark and toasted flavours and aromas of the roasting, light roasts let the beans’ natural characteristics shine through.

No wonder consumers are developing a taste for their bright acidity and mild body. If you’re looking for great beans that showcase these characteristics, read our picks for the best light roast arabica coffee beans this year.

What is light roast coffee?

Let’s start from the outside, going in.

Lightly roasted coffee beans are light brown in colour and have the least amount of oil on the bean’s surface. This is because, in simple terms, they are exposed to heat for the shortest amount of time.

A light roast highlights the most complex and intertwined flavours found in coffee. At this level, you will notice fruity undertones complimented with a light and lingering body. As a result, it’s no surprise that beans are the densest when lightly roasted.

Now that we’ve talked about the outside, what about the inside of the coffee beans? It takes two cracks for green beans to completely transform from green to medium roast. Coffee beans absorb heat first, then release it. This is when they get crackalacking.

Lightly roasted beans are “cooked” between the first and second cracks. Around this time, the bean’s sugars break down and release those beautiful aromatics flavours you, I, and many others have come to savour.

Does light roast have more flavour than dark roast?

Most people agree that light roast coffee beans are USUALLY more flavorful than a dark roast. But as with many things in coffee, it depends.

We mentioned that the less time you roast, the more you maintain the original acids and sugars. Following this logic, it extracts more of the flavours from the coffee bean.

There is no single recipe for roasting coffee beans from different origins. While there’s a lot of science, there’s even more room for personal preference. Light roast coffee shatters expectations regarding complex, fruity, and savoury notes morphing out of the bean and into your cup.

This is why only the most high-quality beans are roasted lightly and more thought is put into buying whole bean coffee to grind at home vs the roast itself, which is an available choice of preference.

Let’s take a look at some of them!

The best light roasts arabica coffee beans in 2022

Lifeboost organic light roast coffee – Best overall

Specifications

Nutrition expert Dr Charles Livingston founded Lifeboost Coffee to deliver delicious coffee with a nutritional boost. He achieved this through a commitment to sourcing only the top quality coffee, with just 0.5% of beans grown worldwide, meeting their stringent standards.

This organic light roast consists of quality arabica coffee beans from the mountains of Nicaragua. They’re organically grown in the shade of guava trees on a small plantation located 5,700 feet on Mt. Kilambe.

The beans are hand-picked, sun-dried, and washed in spring water to preserve the purity of the coffee throughout the process. As a result, they are third-party certified to be free from mycotoxins, potentially harmful toxins in low quantities in most coffee beans, notably lower quality ones.

The dominant flavour profile is nutty, with undercurrents of caramel sweetness. Vibrant aromas of vanilla and hazelnut accompany such features. It’s so good that we can’t help but call it our best light roast brand.

Fresh roasted coffee ethiopian sidamo guji coffee – Best Budget

Specifications

A top-of-the-line coffee bean from Ethiopia usually comes with a price tag to match. Still, the Ethiopian Sidamo Guji coffee from Fresh Roasted Coffee is the rare exception, making it our pick for the best value light roast whole bean coffee this year.

The growers choose their beans carefully and sustainably, considering origin, flavour profile, and quality. Afterwards, they roast the beans in a speciality Loring Smart Roaster, which offers enhanced roasting precision while cutting carbon emissions by up to 80%.

Guji is in the Oromia coffee-growing region of Southern Ethiopia. This region is said to produce some of the highest quality coffees in the country. It features a dry climate and acidic soil that grows coffee beans renowned for their remarkable fruity flavours.

Sidamo Guji coffee is dominated by fruity and wine-like flavour notes, featuring cherry and strawberry, and the use of natural processing further enhances this. Expect a medium body, bright acidity, and an excellent earthy finish.

Peet’s costa rica aurora – Best blend

Specifications

Founded over 50 years ago in the San Francisco Bay area, Peet’s Coffee is renowned for its signature blends. They’ve put their decades of experience to good use in crafting perfectly balanced flavours to showcase each roast.

Rather than tone down the inherent brightness of a light roast, their Cost Rica Aurora blend puts it front and centre.

The first step in creating any blend is quality sourcing, and Peet’s works directly with farmers to ensure they are getting the top speciality coffee beans. They have even pioneered a Farmer Assistance program, which assists farmers who have the potential to grow speciality coffee but lack the techniques needed to do so.

This expands Peet’s supply of high-grade beans and provides economic assistance in coffee-growing regions.

The Costa Rican beans in this blend are the highest quality Strictly Hard Fancy grade, sourced from the mountains of Tarrazu and Naranjo. They offer notes of clean, sweet citrus reminiscent of a lemon bar.

The flavour is with the addition of Kenyan beans, which deliver the deep, silky flavours of molassesbrown sugar, and blackcurrant for which the region is known.

Kuju coffee angel’s landing – Best single serve

Specifications

With their unique design and high-quality coffee, Kuju’s single-serve pour-over coffee packets were impossible to leave. These single-serve packets, made from environmentally friendly compostable and recyclable materials, turn into small pour-over filters, prefilled with measured amounts of ground coffee beans and designed to anchor on any coffee mug.

All you need to do is add water. It’s as easy as instant coffee but with the quality of a tremendous pour-over brew.

Made from 100% arabica beans from Thailand, Central, and South America, Kuju’s speciality grade light roast ground coffee is known as Angel’s Landing. The beans are a blend sourced from around the world, but primarily from a Thailand grower who employs former victims of sex trafficking as they re-establish their lives.

The dominant flavour notes are floralnutty, and citrus and this roast feature a medium body with light acidity. Each packet is nitro-flushed to remove all oxygen and keep the light roast ground coffee beans as fresh as possible.

Kuju’s state-of-the-art facility functions on 100% wind power, and they are a member of 1% for the PlanetPlanet, donating 1% of all their sales to the National Park Foundation. Kuju coffee is a rare single-serve convenience product you can feel good about using.

Dune zip zinger – Best pre-ground

Specifications

Dune Coffee Roasters is a small-batch roaster based in Santa Barbara, California, and they know good coffee. So much so that one of their employees placed third in the 2018 United States Barista Championship (5).

The Zip Zinger is their signature light roast breakfast blend coffee, which they adjust seasonally to ensure it features only the freshest. This light roast ground coffee’s current mix consists of Brazillian, Ethiopian, and Colombian beans.

Combined with washed and naturally processed beans, the blend achieves a perfect balance of bright acidity with rich, darker undertones, yielding an incredibly versatile brew — an excellent choice for adventurous coffee lovers.

With dominant tasting notes of stone fruit, caramel, and chocolate, this is the rare light roast that shines on its own and is equally delicious with the addition of milk or cream. You might even like it as an unusual and tasty espresso, with the familiar chocolate notes enhanced by the bright acidity and mellow sweetness.

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