Commercial Espresso Bean Recommendations & Espresso Coffee Bean Selection - Espresso Blend Price Comparison

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FrontStreet Coffee's Espresso Bean Recommendations: Are there any good, cost-effective espresso beans suitable for café production and latte art? The answer is: yes.

What is Blended Coffee?

Different coffee beans have distinct characteristics due to their varieties and origins. Their flavors—including acidity, bitterness, sweetness, aroma, and body—exhibit subtle differences. Single-origin coffee beans typically emphasize the unique characteristics of a particular coffee type. Blended coffee, also known as mixed coffee, involves combining various single-origin coffee beans to fully leverage their strengths, complementing each other to create richer new flavors through either complementary or enhanced combinations.

Before blending any coffee, it's essential to understand the flavor characteristics of each coffee variety and have a clear vision of the desired coffee profile—something that no single-origin coffee can achieve. If the blended coffee doesn't taste better than one or more of its component coffees, it would be regrettable, and blending would be unnecessary. Generally, blended coffee doesn't need to use more than five types of coffee beans. Using too many varieties can create complexity that only very specialized experts can handle without getting confused by so many different beans.

In普及咖啡烘焙与拼配知识, people blend coffees from different origins for several different purposes. The ideal goal 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 produce very good coffee: clean aromas, smooth texture, and sweet aftertaste. Therefore, "blending" (i.e., combining coffees from different origins) isn't always necessary.

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

Blending Methods

First, decide on the base coffee bean to use in the blend, using this bean as the center, then further select other varieties rich in personality to harmonize the overall flavor.

Second, you can try combining coffee beans with completely opposite characteristics, which can add more special coffee aromas.

Third, combine similar bean types and blend them, then further select varieties rich in distinctive flavors to add special aromas 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 coffee beans in different proportions according to their characteristics. Below are several representative blending ratios, and of course, you can also challenge yourself to try proportions you like.

Example Blending Ratios

1. Espresso blending method: Colombia 70%, Brazil 30%

2. Bitter-tasting commercial coffee blending method: Colombia 60%, Brazil 20%, Indonesian Robusta 10%

There are two blending methods: roast first then blend, and blend first then roast—also known as post-roast blending and pre-roast blending. The latter poses greater challenges for the roaster. Blended beans need to be rested for several days to allow the characteristics between beans to integrate and flavors to balance and unify. Post-roast blending generally requires about a week of resting; pre-roast blending can be used after 3-4 days of resting, because different beans have already influenced each other during roasting.

To emphasize rich, intense flavors, prioritize Colombian beans with full body and moderate acidity, complemented by balanced Brazilian beans and rich, full-bodied blended coffee with prominent bitterness. If you want to add some sweetness, you can appropriately include coffee beans with mellow bitterness.

Coffee bean creativity lies in blending. To show respect for the careful consideration given to coffee beans, calling it "creative" is more appropriate. However, this different way of calling it is different from Kong Yiji's "stealing" versus "borrowing." Before discussing specific ratio data, let's do some preparation work. First is to understand the basic points of creative coffee blending. Of course, this is also the basic ethics of doing things, just as we need to choose good water quality, good teapots, etc. before brewing tea. Creative coffee is no exception.

Four Key Principles for Creative Blending

First: Choose high-quality coffee beans. Actually, I feel this sentence is a bit redundant myself—who doesn't know this?! Using poor-quality coffee beans will greatly diminish the coffee's flavor. Even if you create a very balanced single-origin coffee, you can't make delicious coffee. Choosing high-quality coffee beans is the most important point.

Second: Remove defective beans. When defective beans are mixed in, the flavor will deteriorate. So we should not hesitate to remove flawed beans—it's better to have quality than quantity. Things like worm-infested holes, abnormal development, shells without kernels—all should be picked out.

Third: Understand the characteristics of coffee beans. If you don't have a good understanding of the individual characteristics of the coffee beans you're planning to blend, I think it's difficult to create good coffee or the coffee you expect. At this point, you're like a team manager—you must understand your team members well to make the best use of their talents. If you blindly command without understanding, it will be a mess. For example, if you assign someone who can't stop looking at their keyboard during meals to do public relations, someone whose butt gets itchy as soon as they sit down to be an accountant, and someone who stares fixedly at the floor without moving to do customer service, the result is predictable. Actually, blending coffee beans is the same. The various coffee beans in your hands are your soldiers—you must first understand which are more acidic, which are more bitter. If you want to use Mocha, which is already quite acidic, to dilute acidity, it will only have the opposite effect.

Fourth: Understand different roasting levels. Different coffee beans develop different flavors at different roasting levels, so we must also grasp this well. For example, Brazil and Blue Mountain are generally medium-light roasts, charcoal-roasted is dark roast, etc.

Practical Examples (10 is maximum, based on dark roast standard)

FrontStreet Coffee's Recommended Espresso Beans:

1. Formula: Guatemala + Mexico + Brazil + Kilimanjaro
Result: Aroma 5, Bitterness 5, Sweetness 5, Acidity 5

2. Formula: Sumatra Mandheling + Colombia + Brazil + Kilimanjaro
Result: Aroma 5, Bitterness 10, Sweetness 5, Acidity 3

3. Formula: Mocha + Hawaii Kona + Brazil + Kilimanjaro
Result: Aroma 9, Bitterness 10, Sweetness 7, Acidity 10

4. Formula: Guatemala + Mocha + Kilimanjaro
Result: Aroma 10, Bitterness 5, Sweetness 6, Acidity 7

5. Formula: Brazil + Mexico + Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee
Result: Aroma 5, Bitterness 3, Sweetness 5, Acidity 6

6. Formula: Brazil + Colombia + Java Robusta Coffee
Result: Aroma 3, Bitterness 8, Sweetness 8, Acidity 6

FrontStreet Coffee's Espresso Bean Recommendations

FrontStreet Coffee's roasted Frontsteet Espresso Blend coffee beans have full guarantees in both brand and quality. More importantly, they offer extremely high cost-performance. Taking the commercially recommended model—Frontsteet Commercial Blend Coffee Beans—as an example, one package is one pound (454 grams) with a price of only about 60 yuan. Calculating based on 10 grams of coffee powder per single espresso shot, one package can make 45 cups of coffee, with each cup costing less than 1.5 yuan. Even using double shots for each espresso at 20 grams per cup, the price of one double espresso doesn't exceed 3 yuan. Compared to certain well-known brands that sell packages for over a hundred yuan, this is truly a conscientious recommendation, suitable for daily café production.

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