A Guide to Japanese Coffee Roast Levels (浅煎り, 中煎り, 深煎り)

If you’ve ever visited a Japanese coffee shop and found yourself confused by their bean roast levels, me too! I’m still relatively new to the world of pourover coffee, but over the past year I’ve been visiting coffee roasteries around Tokyo and trying out a lot of new coffee beans as a hobby. Recently I had a bit of a confusing experience when it comes to roast level categories, so I decided to dive down the roasting rabbit-hole to try and figure out what sort of beans I was actually buying. In Japan, coffee bean shops will generally divide their roasting levels into three basic categories: 浅煎り (“asa-iri”) or light roast 中煎り (“chuu-iri”) or medium roast 深煎り (“fuka-iri”) or dark roast You can see this at a store like Honey Beans in Sugamo, where they stock their “asa-iri” beans on the left, through to their “fuka-iri” beans on the right. I only ever buy coffee beans in Japan, so I don’t have much to compare against in terms of how other countries might do things - but it does seem like…