My brother brought me a gift from Vietnam: a Vietnamese style filter pot and some local Robusta beans. I followed the recipe from the bag:
- 20g coffee grounded super fine
- 10ml and 30s bloom
- 60ml of additional water (70ml with bloom water)
This yields a super concentrated 30ml cup. Not something I would drink black. The coffee flavor will come through in Vietnamese recipe involving salted cream and concentrated milk.
Vietnam is influenced heavily by France. French roast is essentially a very dark roasting style. Dark roasts tend to be greasy due to the beans releasing their oils after heavy roasting.
So if anything, the coffee should be less oily?
I imagine it doesn’t matter much with my Aeropress, though, since paper filters tend to filter the oils away as well - but the traditional Vietnamese coffee filter is metal.
I’m not sure I follow what you mean by less oily. Dark roast beans are more likely to have oil on the surface. The oils are also generally something dark roast lovers try to retain in the brew, which is why a french press or a metal filter are good options for something like a french roast.
I think the oils add more body to the brew, which may affect how you perceive the flavor. This is also why people like light roasts through paper filters to achieve a more “clean” cup.
I was just thinking that if the oil was on the surface, more of it was likely to disappear for some reason, rather than if it’s on the inside of the bean. I don’t know if that makes sense, really, I doubt the oil would evaporate?
Oils generally don’t evaporate. You can change the type of filter to adjust the amount of oils in the cup. Paper filters remove much of the oil, metal filters allow oils to pass to the cup, and I think cotton filters are in a medium place.
No, I think oil evaporates/boils at very high temperatures (think of how deep-frying is done at 325+ degrees). I think the oil on the surface of the bean in facts makes an oilier cup, based on my anecdotal evidence. You could do an experiment with a greasy and non-greasy dark roast and see which roast produces an oilier/fuller brew.
the plot thickens! There are greasy and non-greasy dark roasts?
Oh, definitely. Greasy roasts are on the extreme end of the “dark roast” scale. I actually tend to be disappointed with greasy roasts and avoid them.
Yeah, I usually go for the lightest roast I can find, and since I’ve moved to a very small town, that usually means something close to medium dark :p