How to Blend Coffee Beans? Sharing Various Single-Origin Coffee Bean Blending Ratios and Recipes

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Blending coffee is like a painter mixing captivating colors on a palette—blenders can use coffee beans to create enticing flavors. It's no exaggeration to say that blending is an art form. As artists, blenders need not only experience and inspiration but also precise scientific calculations. The creation of art is never accidental; it's the culmination of long-term accumulation.

Although blending a quality coffee bean might sound challenging, that shouldn't stop us from trying. FrontStreet Coffee roughly breaks down the blending process to help everyone understand FrontStreet Coffee's approach to blending.

Part One - Defining the Purpose of Blending

1. Cost Reduction

Some coffee shops mix lower-quality coffee beans with higher-quality ones to reduce costs while increasing profit margins.

2. Creating Long-Term Stable Flavors

We must admit that coffee is an agricultural product. The same origin region can produce different flavors in different harvest seasons or even different batches throughout the year. This exposes the drawback of single-origin coffee—you can't confidently guarantee that you'll be able to drink the same single-origin coffee next year that you enjoyed this year (except for coffee beans where processing methods dominate flavor, and other factors between origin and coffee shop can also cause flavor differences in the beans you purchase).

Therefore, one purpose of blending is to create a product that can be supplied long-term with consistently stable flavors. When one coffee bean in a new harvest season fails to meet quality requirements or undergoes changes, you can find similar replacement beans to achieve stability.

3. Creating Flavors Unattainable by Single Coffee Beans

Sometimes single-origin coffee beans are like individuals—they have both strengths and weaknesses. Blending is like organizing a team, taking each member's strengths to compensate for others' weaknesses, thereby achieving complementary effects.

For example, blending a high-sweetness coffee bean with a high-acidity one to achieve a sweet-sour balance, or adding some Brazilian beans to enhance overall body—these are all purposes of blending.

Part Two - Determining Target Flavor Profile

Once we've established the purpose, the next step is to determine the target flavor profile for the blended coffee beans. Only with clear goals can we know where to begin. This step also greatly tests the blender's understanding of existing coffee beans and flavor characteristics of different coffee regions.

When FrontStreet Coffee first created the Warm Sun blend, we were very clear about wanting to create a blend with wine-like aromas. Therefore, we immediately included three coffee beans with wine barrel fermentation and distinct wine-like aromas in our candidate list: Honduras Sherry Barrel, Honduras Lychee Orchid, and Colombia San José.

Through multiple trials and considering factors like cost-effectiveness, we finally settled on Honduras Sherry Barrel as the main tone for the Warm Sun blend.

Part Three - Determining the Blending Type

Generally, we refer to "blend before roasting" as "raw blending" and "blend after roasting" as "roasted blending." Both types have their advantages and disadvantages—there's no superiority or inferiority between them. You can choose the type that suits you based on their characteristics.

The advantage of raw blending is that you can use the same roast degree to make the coffee more consistent and uniform. Secondly, it reduces the number of roasting sessions—one roast is sufficient, improving efficiency. The same roast degree also greatly reduces quality control challenges (same roast means focusing on just one resting period, whereas raw blending can easily result in different roast dates for several blended beans, causing flavor differences).

However, the disadvantages of raw blending are also very obvious. Raw blending has significant limitations and is generally recommended for beans with similar densities. For example, blending a bean suitable for light roast with one suitable for dark roast and roasting them to the same degree can easily lead to 1+1

The advantage of roasted blending is that you can roast each bean to its optimal roast degree, maximizing each bean's characteristics. FrontStreet Coffee uses roasted blending when roasting the Warm Sun blend, separately roasting the Honduras Sherry Barrel beans and the natural Yirgacheffe Red Cherry Project to maximize the wine aroma of the Sherry Barrel beans while preserving the fruity acidity and citrus-berry aromas of the natural Yirgacheffe. After adjustment, the Agtron value of the natural Yirgacheffe was 58.4, while the Sherry Barrel blend's Agtron value was 50.8.

But as mentioned earlier, the disadvantage of roasted blending is that daily quality control and management become more challenging. Inconsistent roast dates require attention to more resting periods. Imagine using 4-5 coffee beans for roasted blending—this one product would require tracking 4-5 different roast dates.

Part Four - Determining Blending Ratios

Finally, blending requires determining the ratios, which is also a crucial step. FrontStreet Coffee recommends dividing this process into two steps: preliminary confirmation and final confirmation.

Preliminary confirmation uses cupping methods, extracting several candidate coffee beans separately. This serves two purposes:

First, to evaluate the flavor and quality of the candidate coffee beans. Before blending, you must first confirm whether the coffee quality meets standards and whether there are flavor differences. This step is very important for creating a specialty-grade blended coffee bean.

Second, to preliminarily confirm ratios. After extraction, coffee liquid is extracted and mixed in different proportions, designing several different ratio schemes. Through slurping, an optimal range is confirmed.

Final confirmation involves roasting according to the blending type (raw or roasted) confirmed in Part Three, using the range values from preliminary confirmation. It's then tasted using the extraction method aligned with the product positioning. For example, when FrontStreet Coffee created the Warm Sun blend, the goal was to supply it for espresso coffee, so it was tasted through espresso extraction methods—making espresso, Americano, and milk coffee to finally confirm the blend's performance.

Similarly, if the blending purpose is for pour-over coffee, then the pour-over method should be used to confirm the blend's performance.

Important Notice :

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FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473