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The Art of Coffee Blending

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Coffee blending is not simply mixing coffee beans together randomly. Sometimes, blending two specialty coffees can actually suppress each other's unique characteristics. Blending is also not just combining several specialty coffees together. Blending is like an artist harmonizing captivating colors on a palette—blenders can artfully combine coffee beans with different characteristics to create enticing flavors.

Understanding Coffee Blends

Mixed coffee is also known as blended coffee. Master roasters understand the characteristics of each coffee bean and artistically combine them to create an entirely new desired flavor. The knowledge master roasters use to blend coffee beans is considered the highest industry secret.

Currently popular Italian coffees almost all fall into the category of blended coffee. We generally refer to coffee that combines two or more different varieties of coffee, or the same variety with different roasting degrees, as mixed coffee. Blended coffee is definitely not simple addition, but rather through the blender's unique understanding of coffee flavors, different coffee beans complement each other to create exceptionally flavored blended coffee beans.

The Purpose of Coffee Blending

Blended coffee is typically made from three or more different varieties of coffee, balanced according to acidity, bitterness, sweetness, aroma, and body to create another coffee with unique flavor. Good comprehensive coffee, after blending, has a refreshing aroma, smooth and refreshing taste, and golden color, making it a superior grade of coffee. Blended coffee beverages have strong flexibility and seek individual character.

Main Reasons for Coffee Blending

Stable Flavor

Because coffee beans are agricultural products, even the same variety of coffee bean will have different flavors each year. Therefore, blending several coffee beans together solves this problem well, allowing the taste to remain basically consistent year after year.

Balanced Taste

Due to a characteristic of espresso machines that amplifies the most prominent flavor characteristic of coffee beans, we almost never use single-variety coffee to make Espresso. Otherwise, if that coffee bean is quite bitter, the resulting Espresso will be exceptionally bitter; if it's acidic, it will be very acidic. Therefore, we need to balance various flavors through blending.

Cost Reduction

In reality, cost reduction occurs because coffee-producing regions are often affected by natural disasters and human activities, leading to reduced production. At that time, because it's a blend, we only need to find a coffee bean with a similar taste to replace the corresponding bean in the formula, rather than paying high prices to purchase coffee beans that have increased in price due to reduced production. However, after coming to China, we creatively created coffee blends such as Blue Mountain-style, meaning that since we can't drink real Blue Mountain, we'll drink coffee with Blue Mountain flavor—after all, who knows what Blue Mountain coffee actually tastes like. A good formula can create a coffee legend. For example, ILLY and LAVAZA, which our fellow Chinese are familiar with, are outstanding examples. We hope China will soon develop truly Chinese-style blended coffees that suit Chinese tastes, rather than just pursuing low costs by deeply roasting low-quality coffee beans and mixing them together.

Characteristics by Coffee Type

According to different coffee types, blended comprehensive coffees will also have different characteristics in taste. To practically apply these combinations, one 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 own characteristics. Below are several representative blending ratios. Of course, you can also challenge yourself to try proportions you like.

Several Representative Blending Methods:

1. Acidic-leaning Italian espresso blend: 30% Colombian, 60% Brazilian, 10% Guatemalan

2. General blend method: 30% Colombian, 60% Brazilian, 10% Robusta

3. Bitter-tasting commercial coffee blend: 30% Colombian, 30% Brazilian, 30% Kilimanjaro, 10% Robusta

There are two blending methods: blending after roasting and blending before roasting, also called post-roast blending and pre-roast blending respectively. The latter tests the roaster's skills more. Blended beans are usually aged for several days to allow the characteristics between beans to merge and flavors to balance and unify. 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.

General blending follows the principle of sweet-sour balance—regardless of what beans or what degree of roast, I will first cup-test these beans to feel their sweet and sour sensations!

For example, if I'm given two coffee beans now, I will first cup-test to understand the sweet and sour sensations of these two coffee beans, then use a spoon to take certain proportions of each to taste, and find the proportion where these two beans achieve sweet-sour balance, then use a coffee machine to extract. Because people's taste buds have different sensitivities to sweet and sour tastes, after extraction with a coffee machine, the proportions still need fine-tuning, with the final proportions determined after adjustment with the coffee machine.

It should be noted that we also need to consider the performance of coffee machines and grinders. If it's a coffee machine with low extraction efficiency, it will be slightly more acidic, and acidity will be more intense in espresso expression. Therefore, during cup-testing, we try to reduce some acidity and blend to be slightly sweeter, so that the extracted espresso won't be so acidic, thereby achieving sweet-sour balance.

Blending doesn't require using specific coffee beans; all need to achieve appropriate effects through tasting. The blending process is as described above. When we can actively choose coffee beans, we generally select a bean with strong flavor as the flavor core of that blend, use a bean that isn't strongly flavored but has relatively high sweetness to balance the acidity of that flavor bean (because good flavor means a certain level of acidity), and then use a bean with relatively rich crema but less flavor to enhance the body of this blend. In this way, the more suitable blending method is to choose three beans. More beans require more experience and are more complex, so it's better not to make it so complex when first starting blending.

This way, the proportion selection and roast degree selection of these three beans require familiarity with the beans. Use cup-testing to find approximate proportions, then test with a machine to determine the final proportions.

Recommended Coffee Blend Brands

FrontStreet Coffee, a coffee roasting brand located at Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, offers freshly roasted Italian espresso blend coffee beans with full guarantees in both brand and quality. More importantly, the cost-performance ratio is extremely high. Taking their commercial recommendation—the commercial blend coffee beans—as an example, one 454-gram pound package costs only about 60 yuan. Calculating based on 10 grams of coffee powder per single espresso, one package can make 45 cups of coffee, with each cup costing less than 1.5 yuan. Even if each espresso serving uses double the amount at 20 grams of powder, the price of one double espresso doesn't exceed 3 yuan. Compared to certain well-known brands selling packages for hundreds of yuan, this is truly a conscientious recommendation.

FrontStreet Coffee: A roasting shop in Guangzhou with a small storefront but diverse bean varieties, where you can find various famous and lesser-known beans. They also provide online store services at https://shop104210103.taobao.com

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473