Caffeine Content in Dark Roast Coffee

People are becoming more and more health conscious with each passing day especially because of the rapidly growing number of enigmatic and incurable diseases. They like to know the contents and nutritional value of each and every thing that they gulp down, be it a Mc Donald’s burger or a cup of coffee.

That is the very reason that most of the companies now a day print a whole nutritional value chart on the back of their products so as to satisfy their customers. Each ingredient is catered to in this regard and special care is taken not to miss anything. This is not so easy a task. The product sample has to undergo minute chemical tests and checks.

Take coffee for example. The debate on its value in terms of human health is still under process and no result so far is final. One side does research and claims coffee to be highly beneficial. The other side, however, comes up with a strong counter argument, claiming it to be dangerous for health.

One such debate is whether dark roast coffee contains higher caffeine levels as compared to light roast coffee. The answer is not that simple. It actually depends on how you measure the caffeine level present in the coffee under analysis. We all know that anything that is roasted on such a high temperature is bund to lose a large amount of its water content. Same is the case with coffee. Interestingly, however, when coffee beans lose water, they become low in weight and larger in size.

This gives an all new turn to our question. We also know that water content in dark roast coffee is lower as compared to that in light roast coffee. So, if we assume that all the other variables are uniform, then if you measure the coffee by weight then dark roast coffee has more caffeine in it due to the faster water lost during its roasting process. Now, interestingly, if you measure the coffee by volume, you will have lesser caffeine in dark roast coffee because the beans lose their density in the roasting process and thus are lighter.

So measurement with scoop will result in less caffeine level and measurement by weight will lead to higher caffeine levels per cup. So it all depends on how you measure your coffee’s caffeine contents. The differences that you will notice will not be very large. Moreover, this disparity only arises if you have identical cups of coffee under analysis.

It is plausible only if you are comparing two available brewed coffees that a differentiation in varietals among them could make them have as much effect as the roast and the preparation method will almost certainly had a larger effect than the roast level or varietal. If there is a Robusta in one of the coffees it is almost guaranteed to have more caffeine. This is mostly a scholastic debate because the differences in caffeine content are relatively very small and difficult to find out.