the opposite, the ubiquity of burnt mud in every office coffee warmer seems to have dulled the American palate, that or the over abundance of artificial ingredients in everything, to the extent that they simply cannot discern what good coffee is, because it's either that or coffee that looks like the water from a particularly detail oriented miniature painting session; scant colour, scant aroma.

I will admit of course that the French seem to enjoy charcoal, and when in my teens I worked as at a shop the beans that were left too long in the roaster were usually marked as "French Roast"