After hitting the snooze button an undisclosed amount of times, I know I need to beeline it straight to the coffeemaker. Yes, to me, coffee is a must. People joke about the “don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee,” but there’s something about a morning cup of coffee that gives me the extra oomph to get started. Since coffee is such a vital drink, I want to know which type of roast has the most caffeine. Surprisingly, the answer isn’t what you’d expect.
Many think a dark roast’s robust flavor translates into having more caffeine, but that is not the case. When roasting coffee, you don’t lose caffeine amounts, the caffeine amounts stay virtually the same.
However how you brew your pot of joe determines the level of caffeine you’ll be drinking. As you roast a bean, the water leaves it. The interior of the bean then becomes more and more porous, and the bean loses weight. Darker roasted beans are lighter and puffy, while lighter roasted beans are heavier and keep their original, smaller shape.
If you make coffee by measuring your coffee by weight, then a dark roast will have more caffeine. When you weigh out coffee, you’ll have to use more dark roasted beans than a denser, weighted light roast. Scooping your dark roast means you’ll have less caffeine.
Yet if you’re scooping your light roast coffee by volume, you’ll serve yourself more caffeine. This is because when you prepare a light roast with a scoop, the beans will be denser and heavier, so you’ll use more light-roasted beans to get a full scoop.
Unless you weigh out your coffee, you’re gonna get a stronger buzz from those lighter roasts. Honestly, this is the opposite of what most would think. All those years of drinking medically bitter cups of dark roast are in vain!