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What is Espresso Blend? How to Choose Coffee Bean Blend Combinations? What Are the Differences Between Roasted Blending and Raw Blending?

Published: 2026-01-27 Author: FrontStreet Coffee

Last Updated: 2026/01/27, For more professional coffee knowledge and coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat official account: cafe_style). What is blend coffee? Single origin coffee refers to coffee beans of a single variety, single origin, or single roast level. Blend coffee refers to coffee beans of different varieties, different origins, or different roast levels

Professional coffee knowledge exchange. For more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat public account: cafe_style).

What is Coffee Blending

Single origin coffee refers to coffee beans from a single variety, single origin, or single roast level.

Blended coffee refers to coffee beans from different varieties, different origins, or different roast levels, combined according to specific needs, typically using 2-5 types of coffee beans. Too many varieties can make it difficult to express the unique flavors of coffee.

Coffee blends generally do not use a 1:1 blending ratio, as this may suppress each other's distinctive flavors. Therefore, blending requires a primary and secondary distinction to create a more wonderful taste than single origin coffee. If you want the blended coffee to have complex and varied flavors, you can reduce the proportion of the main base bean, and vice versa. Coffee blending relies on continuous trial and cupping, so before blending, you should adopt a mathematical combination approach to create a blending plan, then determine the optimal solution through the blending-cupping process. Don't think this is outdated or lacks technological support. In fact, only through the blender's experience, inspiration, and such tireless experimentation can a good cup of blended coffee be created.

Why Blend Coffee

There are generally four purposes for blending.

Cost Reduction: To pursue certain flavors by using some lower-priced coffee beans to create flavors similar to relatively high-priced coffee beans. For example: Blue Mountain flavored coffee.

Balance Flavor: Espresso machines have a characteristic of amplifying the most prominent flavor characteristic of coffee beans, so almost no single variety of coffee beans is used to make espresso. Otherwise, if the coffee bean is quite bitter, the resulting espresso will be exceptionally bitter; if it's acidic, it will be very acidic. Therefore, blending is needed to balance various flavors.

Stable Flavor: Because coffee beans are an agricultural product, even coffee beans of the same variety and from the same region will have different flavors each year. Therefore, mixing several types of coffee beans together solves this problem well, keeping the flavor basically consistent year after year.

Unique Flavor: For people who cannot satisfy their taste buds by drinking any single origin coffee, or for some businesses that want to have their own unique flavored coffee beans, they will blend several types of coffee beans.

How to Blend Coffee

Different coffee beans have different characteristics due to different varieties and origins, with subtle differences in acidity, bitterness, sweetness, aroma, body, and other flavor aspects. Single origin coffee beans often focus more on expressing the unique characteristics of a certain type of coffee. Blended coffee, also called mixed coffee, combines various single origin coffee beans to fully leverage the strengths of each, complementing each other's weaknesses, creating new tastes that are either complementary or enhanced, resulting in richer new flavors.

Acidity: Mocha, Hawaiian Kona, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica SHB, Tanzania Kilimanjaro, Colombia, El Salvador, high-quality washed new beans from the Western Hemisphere.

Bitterness: Java, Mandheling, Bogota, Congo, Uganda.

Sweetness: Colombia (Mandheling), Venezuela (aged coffee), Blue Mountain, Tanzania Kilimanjaro, Mocha, Guatemala, Mexico, Kenya, Brazil Santos, Haiti.

Body: Colombia (Mandheling), Mocha, Blue Mountain, Guatemala, Costa Rica.

Neutral: Brazil, El Salvador, low-altitude Costa Rica, Venezuela, Honduras, Cuba.

How to Roast Coffee Blends

The most ideal purpose of blending is, of course, to create a coffee that tastes better than any of its individual components. However, generally speaking, single-origin Arabica coffee is sufficient to make very good-tasting coffee: fragrant aroma, smooth texture, and sweet aftertaste. Therefore, "blending" is not always necessary.

When mixing coffee, you can first understand three extremely preliminary coffee bean mixing methods.

First, decide on the base coffee beans to be used in the blend, use this coffee bean as the center, and further select other varieties rich in character to harmonize the overall flavor.

You can try combining completely opposite types of coffee beans, which can add more special coffee aroma.

Combine similar types of beans and fuse them together, then further select flavorful bean varieties to add special aroma to the overall coffee.

To practically apply these combinations, you must first understand the flavors of dozens of single origin coffees. Each coffee shop will also blend different proportions of coffee beans according to their own characteristics. Below are several representative blending ratios. Of course, you can also challenge yourself to try proportions you like.

Acidic-leaning espresso blend method: Colombia 30%, Brazil 60%, Guatemala 10%.

General mixed coffee blend method: Colombia 30%, Brazil 60%, Robusta 10%. FrontStreet Coffee's commercial blend coffee beans sold in stores use this blending method. This FrontStreet Coffee espresso blend has nut, cocoa, and caramel flavor profiles, suitable for daily shop needs.

Bitter-tasting commercial coffee blend method: Colombia 30%, Brazil 30%, Kilimanjaro 30%, Robusta 10%.

There are two methods for blending beans: roast then blend (post-roast blending) and blend then roast (pre-roast blending), also called "shou pin" (ripe blend) and "sheng pin" (raw blend). The latter poses a greater challenge to the roaster. Blended beans are aged for several days to allow the characteristics between beans to merge, creating balanced and unified flavors. Post-roast blending generally requires about a week of aging; pre-roast blending can be used after 3-4 days of aging because different beans have already influenced each other during roasting.