What Are the Best Dark Roast Coffees Right Now?

Dark roasts have had a rough decade in specialty circles. The rise of third-wave coffee culture brought with it a corrective skepticism toward the charred, ashy cups that defined second-wave specialty coffee at the turn of this century. Today, light and medium roasts have become the house style of the discerning and the vehicle through which origin character — terroir, variety, process — can finally speak without interference from heavy-handed roasting.

The critique, taken on its own terms, is fair. A poorly conceived dark roast does precisely what its detractors claim: It masks origin, burns off the volatile aromatic compounds that distinguish a Yirgacheffe from a Sumatra, and swaps bitterness for complexity. But this is a critique of execution, not of darkness itself. The question is not whether coffee should be roasted dark, but whether roasters know what they hope to find on the other side of second crack.

Jim, the son of Caesar Tu of Kakalove Cafe, learning his father’s craft at ALO Coffee in Ethiopia. Courtesy of Kakalove Cafe.

If you’re wondering what the best dark roast coffees look like in 2026, the answer is not what it would have been 20 years ago. The strongest examples today are neither oily nor aggressively smoky. Instead, they occupy a narrower band of development in which roast influence and origin character coexist. The 10 coffees highlighted in this report emerged as the highest-scoring selections from nearly 200 blind-tasted submissions, offering a revealing snapshot of what darker-roasted specialty coffee can be right now.

For this report, we pitched the call to roasters interested in submitting as “darker-roasted” (not “dark”), so as not to pre-determine where anyone draws the line between “dark” and “not dark.” This, in fact, was part of our question about the current coffee landscape, though we did specify that submissions should be at, into, or past second crack — that moment in the roasting process literally named for the sound of beans popping a second time after first crack. Second crack marks a chemical inflection point: Cell walls fracture more deeply, CO₂ escapes rapidly and caramelized sugars begin to carbonize. Oils migrate to the surface. Origin character — the volatile aromatics that express terroir, variety, and process — starts its long fade.

Lori Obra, co-founder of Rusty’s Hawaiian on Hawai’i Island. Courtesy of Rusty’s Hawaiian.

When a roaster is interested in pushing a coffee past “medium,” the decision-making process starts in the silence at the end of first crack. In that silence, the beans slowly grow darker, and the roast aroma very gradually turns more pungent and intense. The temperature of the roasting beans rises. And then the first crinkly, rice-crispies sounds of second crack are heard. This is the moment that marks the beginning of the development of the character that we associate with darker-roasted coffees.

We received close to 200 samples for this report and cupped them blind, as usual, in no particular order. And, as it turned out, when we took Agtron readings of the top-scoring 10 for review, we found that every one landed in the same average Agtron range of 44 to 47 — meaning that each was pulled from the roaster at the cusp of second crack, or just into it.

What, then, makes a dark roast one of the best available today? Our highest-scoring submissions shared three qualities. First, they began with exceptional green coffee capable of retaining character under deeper development. Second, they were roasted with clear intent rather than simply pushed darker for intensity’s sake. And third, they delivered the richness, body and bittersweet depth associated with darker roasts without sacrificing distinction. The coffees that follow represent the strongest expressions of those qualities we encountered in this extensive report cupping.

The 10 Top-Scoring Coffees

The throughline of the 10 darker roasts we review here is not merely a shared roast level but a shared refusal to treat darkness as a default. Each starts with green coffees distinctive enough to have something powerful to say at second crack: You’ll find a Kaʻu Typica whose inherent sweetness the roaster has converted into layered, complex structure (Rusty’s Hawaiian); a Kenya SL28 peaberry whose black currant and phosphoric acidity survive heat in transformed but recognizable form (Simon Hsieh’s Aroma Roast Coffees); a washed Guji Ethiopia whose floral charm holds at the cusp rather than burning off (Kakalove Café); and a two-component Colombian blend whose carbonic maceration strawberry note is grounded by an intentionally developed chocolate base (modcup).

Ralph Gaston at the helm of the roaster at Rusty’s Hawaiian. Courtesy of Rusty’s Hawaiian.

The remaining six coffees extend the argument across a wider range of styles and raw materials. An anaerobic washed Guji Ethiopia offers rose, bergamot, and red grape notes that survive medium-dark development in compressed, concentrated form (Linsun Coffee). There’s a washed Nicaragua from the SACACLI Cooperative whose dark chocolate, dried fig, and magnolia resolve into a blissfully long, most harmonious finish (Utopian Coffee). And a washed Peru from the San Fernando Cooperative whose almond butter, red apple, and orange zest are deepened by careful medium-dark development without being displaced by it (Wonderstate Coffee).

The team at Linsun Coffee in Taiwan specializes in darker-roasted specialty coffee. Courtesy of Linsun Coffee.

And then we have a “French roast,” in this case, a washed Colombia-Honduras blend with baking chocolate, dark caramel and a smoky sweetness finish executed with the conviction of restraint (Red Rock Coffee Roasters); a washed Central and South American blend whose caramel, roasted pecan, and scorched cedar deliver classic chocolate-and-nut comfort with a delightful stone fruit lift (Fidalgo Coffee); and an India-Brazil blend that delivers dark chocolate, date, and mandarin zest notes for a fruit-cocoa balance that holds up handsomely in brewed format, despite being roasted with espresso in mind (Oceana Coffee).

Red Rock’s production roaster, Carlos, infuses the FTO French Roast with only the darkest and heaviest of riffs. Courtesy of Red Rock Roasters.

A Note on Roast Measurement

When Coffee Review launched in 1997, roast level was a very important differentiator in specialty coffee. One could buy coffees that were medium-roasted, dark-roasted, or very dark-roasted. As Coffee Review co-founder Kenneth Davids says, “Although our reviews have always shared our cuppers’ perception of roast, we felt we also needed a way to communicate roast level in an objective, quantifiable way to our readers. At the time, the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) had recently adopted its Agtron Gourmet Scale as the industry standard for measuring and communicating the darkness of roast. So, with the generous help of Carl Staub, the founder of Agtron, Coffee Review incorporated the SCAA/Agtron system into the objective portion of our reviews.”

Roaster Nick Berardi of Utopian Coffee in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

However, nearly 30 years have passed, and tastes in roast have radically changed. Lighter roasting now dominates specialty coffee. The (renamed) Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) has begun an in-depth review of how to define the darkness of roast, but the organization is nowhere near changing the current official standards and calibrations. So, the old roast-naming system continues to constitute the “industry standard,” while the industry itself clearly has moved on. Davids adds, “Not one of the 10 coffees we review for this report qualifies under the current SCA system as dark, yet every one was described by the roaster (and sold to customers) as a darker-roasted bean.”

Tending coffee seedlings at a SACACLI Cooperative plant nursery in Nicaragua. Courtesy of Sustainable Harvest.

While the SCA ponders change, we are doing something right now to stop confusing our readers. We will still read the darkness of roast with our well-calibrated Agtron instrument. But we are adjusting the ranges upward by approximately 10 points across all roast-level categories, effective with this report.

The Agtron spectrophotometer measures roast color on a scale from light to dark — higher numbers indicate lighter roasts, lower numbers indicate darker. Our previous scale placed Medium-Dark at 41–50 and Dark at 35–40. These are averages, by the way, of readings taken of coffees as both whole beans and ground.

The new scale places Medium-Dark at 51–60. and Dark at 41–50. The adjustment reflects a real shift in industry usage: Roasters and consumers have been describing coffees as “medium-dark” or “dark” at color readings that our previous scale would have classified as medium or even medium-light (yes, truly). Rather than hold to a calibration that no longer matches how the coffee community speaks, we are aligning our language with the zeitgeist. The coffees in this report, with whole-bean Agtron readings ranging from 44 to 47, fall squarely in the medium-dark range under the new scale — and it is worth noting that all 10 reviewed coffees for our “darker-roasted” call would have been defined as “medium” on our previous Agtron scale.

Coffees drying on raised beds in Ethiopia. Courtesy of Kakalove Cafe.

This roster of 10 darker-roasted coffees justifies the thesis that intentional darkness is not a compromise. It is a craft that asks questions about what survives heat, what is transformed rather than destroyed, and what specific pleasures of viscosity, smokiness and bittersweet depth no medium roast can provide. There is room in a serious coffee drinker’s life for a broader spectrum.

*Thanks to Kenneth Davids, Coffee Review co-founder and author of 21^st Century Coffee: A Guide,  for providing a brief history of the use of the Agtron Gourmet Scale.