Blocked

How dark is this roast?

ALS-COFFEE-1.0-ROAST-001

This question matters to a buyer and CANNOT be answered from a public product page today. What would be required is stated in full.

Why this cannot be run

Blocked by G-03.

Assertion

roast_level equals_one_of light, medium-light, medium, medium-dark, dark

  • light
  • medium-light
  • medium
  • medium-dark
  • dark

Applicability

applies when
the product is roasted coffee
signal
product_type or title indicates coffee

Accepted evidence

  • product_description — a roast designation drawn from a stated scale, ideally with the scale named
  • product_options — a roast level exposed as a product option or specification row

Explicitly insufficient evidence

What does not count, and why. Published because the omission is where a check quietly becomes a claim.

  • a roast level with no scale named
    Roast vocabulary is vendor-defined and the trade's own body concedes that City, Full City, French and Italian may be too arcane or flexible to be meaningful, so a bare word resolves against nothing.
  • "Italian roast", "French roast", "Vienna roast"
    These are roast-degree style names that an origin extractor reads as geography, and Italian roast is the canonical false positive for a country-of-origin check.
  • "bold", "strong", "full-bodied", "intensity 11"
    Intensity scales grade roast and body rather than darkness or caffeine, and no scale behind them is published.
  • a dark-roast description read as higher caffeine
    The inference runs opposite to how coffee is dosed by mass versus volume and is not a stated quantity in either direction.
  • an instrumented colour number quoted for the roaster's equipment rather than this lot
    A capability figure for a machine is not a measurement of the coffee being sold.

Conflict rules

  • When the option value and the description name different roast levels — then record both and report the contradiction; no external definition exists to arbitrate between them

Discrimination

Predicted fail rate: 20-55% (predicted, not yet measured)

Roast level is very commonly stated in some form, but stating it against a named scale is rare, so the band depends entirely on which of the two the assertion demands. A vocabulary matcher would sit at the low end and a scale requirement at the high end; that choice must be made when the mechanism is built.

For a shopper

Of everything printed on a coffee label this is the detail specialty buyers say matters most, and it is also the one with no agreed scale: one roaster's medium is another's medium-dark. Reading the roaster's own scale, where they publish one, is the only way to compare across sellers.

For a merchant

State the roast level and name the scale it is read against, and publish an instrumented colour value where you measure one, so the designation resolves against something other than house convention.

Grounding

  • Specialty Coffee Association (trade_body)
    that of all the information given on a coffee label, roast level is the most important to specialty coffee consumers — while the same body concedes that traditional roast names may be too arcane or flexible to be meaningful, which is exactly the tension this assertion has to encode
  • Independent refuting pass, live search-intent retrieval (internal_measurement)
    that roast level ranks second of ten in the verified shopper-driven core, corroborated across the mainstream trade association and independent consumer studies rather than resting on specialty education material