Have you ever thought, “This featherlight roast is just too shadowy for me?” or “This lightly roasted coffee would be better if it had more caffeine than regular coffee?” If so, you might want to try white coffee—a very, very, very featherlight roast that has a niche but steady following.
While some people employ the word “white coffee” to describe traditionally roasted coffee served simply with milk, in this article we will delve into white coffee, which refers specifically to the level of roasting of the coffee beans, leaving the finished product closer to white (actually more so) than brown.
Where did white coffee come from? Did someone’s roaster break down?
White coffee is said to have its origins in Yemen, where the classic way of drinking coffee is a mixture of ultra-lightly roasted coffee and spices. Lithe roasting of just the grains can be done at home in a pan mixed with grains and spices. You can then brew Yemeni white coffee and serve it with a sweet spice mixture called hawaij, which contains various types of cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, mace, cloves, nutmeg, and so on. Wait – did Yemen actually invent PSL?
What does white coffee taste like?
White coffee can have a nutty, herbal flavor profile, without the typical cozy caramelized sugar notes we’re used to in fully roasted coffee. As a result, most places serving white coffee often add a lot of equipment – as in Yemen.
One of the largest coffee companies popularizing white coffee in the United States is Dutch brothers chain. The company recommends popular white coffee in formats such as White Coffee Coconut Chai Latte, White Coffee Dutch Crunch Breve and White Coffee Jelly Donut Oat Milk Latte (with raspberry pump, salted caramel and almond flavor – no donuts are harmful). Want something simpler? “When it comes to flavor preferences, the possibilities are endless,” says Marshall McAlpine, roastery production manager at Dutch Bros, who assures Sprudge that every espresso-based drink at Dutch Bros can be made with a shot of white coffee.
“The easiest way would be to drink it American style. Yes, you can still order black,” McAlpine says, “but I personally wouldn’t recommend it.” Instead, he says, most customers who prefer a more basic white coffee prefer to enjoy it as a shot served with milk or as an alternative to milk.
How much caffeine is in white coffee?
For many, the supposed high dose of caffeine in white coffee is part of its enormous appeal – although what the actual difference in caffeine content is between a “white” roast and a typical featherlight or medium roast is a matter of debate. Sprudge found that many online coffee sellers claimed that their white coffee contained at least 50% more caffeine than regular roasted coffee, but real science suggests only about a 5% decrease in caffeine content in unroasted to shadowy roasted coffee beans.
Still, the notion that white coffee is an ultra-high-octane brew is clearly part of its marketing appeal. Tami Canaday of Denver’s Wagon Coffee, which serves white roasted Brazilian coffee, says she receives a lot of positive comments from her white coffee customers (including, she says, the drug recovery community that meets at her coffee shop, which “pledges that it gives them much more energy and power.”)
But isn’t white coffee too demanding (literally too demanding) to grind in a standard coffee grinder?
Grinding white coffee would probably be too traumatic for a home grinder or a ceramic burr grinder. According to Lena Battegay, the group’s head of marketing for Mahlkönig/Hemro brands, barely roasted coffee is harder and less brittle than traditionally roasted coffee, so it is more hard to spoil in many grinders. “Plus, the beans are denser,” he says. “Almost as demanding as rocks.”
“This hardness affects both the engine and the burr,” says Battegay. “Due to the inelastic properties of ceramics, ceramic burrs are more likely to break, whereas this is not a problem with steel burrs.” (Battegay assures Sprudge that all of her company’s brands feature German-made steel burrs.) Finally, she notes that “some grinders will not have enough torque to rotate and the lifespan will drop dramatically.”
To meet its own demand for white coffee, Dutch Bros. found it necessary to redesign entire process systems because grinding white coffee with burr grinders “was creating bottlenecks and reducing the efficiency of our production,” McAlpine says. (They have since switched to a roller grinder, which provides greater efficiency while maintaining a consistent particle size. The ground white coffee is then shipped to their cafe, ready to be brewed.)
What are the benefits of white coffee? (Why would I drink it?)
In addition to the dubious belief that white coffee has astronomical caffeine content, many people also believe that white coffee retains more of the beneficial chlorogenic acids found in coffee than roasted versions. However, regardless of these specific acids, white coffee is also considered “less acidic” and supposedly easier to digest. Keep in mind that white coffee has circumscribed popularity, so most of these claims haven’t been well-researched yet – which means if you drink white coffee purely for health, you might just consider switching to tea.
