Tasting my first series of roasts from the new Ethiopian coffee that arrived yesterday. For this one I've skewed my sampling toward the lighter side as that's what I expect I'll want, but I have 12 cups each at a different roast level across a broad range. Aroma is quite nice throughout the range, though the lightest 5 are closest to what I expect I'll want out of this particular coffee.
The first sip confirms the expectation that this is something that I can recommend for my home roasting customers. There are some coffees where there's a very narrow range where the coffee is excellent or maybe a couple disjoint ranges of excellence that are very different from each other but both credibly good. It's hard for me to recommend those to home roasters because it's likely they won't get good results, aren't buying enough to get good at roasting it, don't have the tools they need..
I think I'll run production test batches on both a light and a dark roast, see how those do as drip brews, maybe sell this one two ways.
Then there are other coffees where different roasts taste different, but you can pretty much just do whatever and you'll get something nice out of it. You might like what you get more or less depending on how you roast it, but it'll still be better than what you would have gotten at the grocery store. Those are really my favorite coffees to work with because they highlight the role of the roaster as someone making intentional decisions guiding the flavor that is expressed in the cup.