What Coffee Beans Are Best for Espresso_What Kind of Espresso Blend Does a Coffee Shop Really Need？

What Kind of Espresso Coffee Beans Do We Really Need?

Coffee roasting is like gourmet cooking—replication is already difficult, but even harder is avoiding the scenario where "one person's delicacy is another's poison." A good blend should be "universally appealing."

This is where single-origin coffee falls short: some people love the berry acidity of Kenyan coffee, and an ordinary Kenyan coffee can satisfy their palate, while the friend sitting opposite them, no matter how much you explain the estate, mention its expensiveness, or provide guidance, will find it as unpalatable as cold tomato soup.

1. Don't Overly Pursue Acidity

Coffee roasting is generally divided into three roast levels: light roast (pursuing coffee's floral aromas and herbal fragrances), medium roast (seeking coffee's nutty aromas and caramel notes), and dark roast (finding spice-like, chocolate, and resin aromas).

This year, when creating a custom blend formula for a client in Guangxi, they expressed hope to use Kenyan and Costa Rican beans for a medium roast to create a blend formula with extremely high acidity. Since it's a specialty café with regular customers who are heavy coffee lovers accustomed to acidity, if such a formula were used in many shops, it would likely receive numerous customer complaints.

In our customer surveys, over 70% of customers dislike distinct acidic aromas in coffee. You can get a general understanding by looking at the high sales volume of medium-dark roasted Mandheling coffee on Taobao across the entire market.

Therefore, most of our blend beans are roasted to the beginning through dense stages of the second crack. This roast level for espresso blends remains the market mainstream.

2. If There's One Most Universally Appealing Mouthfeel, It's "Sweetness"

At exhibitions, I've offered sample cups to passing enthusiasts, and regardless of geographical origin, region, or price point, the coffee everyone favored always had distinct sweet flavor characteristics.

Many baristas know that acidic beans can enhance the sweetness when coffee blends with milk, so making a "sweet latte" that everyone likes isn't difficult—you just need to ensure milk quality and make the blend more acidic.

Unfortunately, for many shops, conditions don't allow for two to three espresso grinders for production, so blend beans should ideally accommodate the quality of espresso, black coffee, milk coffee, and iced coffee production.

Through years of procurement and roasting operations, I've discovered several beans that show prominent sweetness in blends: Nicaragua, Brazilian Yellow Bourbon, and El Salvador. Of course, these aren't the only beans that can increase sweetness, but gratifyingly, these three beans also contribute to body, so I personally recommend trying them. Due to diverse procurement channels, specific blend ratios and cupping results require practical testing.

3. Ignore "Personal Style"—Blended Coffee is a "Team" Where Each Component Plays Its Role

I have a friend new to roasting who excitedly shared blend beans with me, saying the formula contained all good beans: natural Yirgacheffe, Kenyan, Guatemala yellow honey, COE beans, and 10% Panama Geisha.

These are all beans that could steal the show. I asked him what roasting style he wanted to express, and he said "the smell of money"—we awkwardly laughed for quite a while.

So before we start coffee roasting, perhaps we should ask ourselves again: "When I scoop 1KG of Indonesian beans in, what exactly am I aiming for?"

Roasters need detailed understanding of most coffee beans on the market—this is like knowing the processing methods and flavor profiles of each ingredient before cooking. With these sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, and rich ingredients before us, "What style do I want to express with this formula I'm making today?"

The work of experimenting with formulas is a real-life version of "Breaking Bad"—aiming to create an exclusive "private cuisine" that belongs to you and is loved by everyone through the flavor fusion between coffee beans. What happens when you blend Colombia's caramel flavors with Costa Rica's vanilla notes? Or can you perfectly integrate the berry-bomb natural Yirgacheffe roasted to medium-dark with existing formula bases? These answers require exploration through practice.

Because espresso exists as concentrated essence, all flavors and defects in coffee beans are amplified several times, so creating a satisfying espresso blend is by no means easy.

Just as many people ask me: "What kind of espresso coffee beans do we really need?"

My answer is: It should be a blend that meets your customers' needs—balanced, smooth, with sweetness, capable of handling various types of shop production.

Oh right, and of course, it would be better if it were cheaper.

FrontStreet Coffee's Recommended Espresso Blend Coffee Beans

FrontStreet Coffee—a coffee roasting brand located at Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou—offers freshly roasted FrontStreet Coffee espresso blend coffee beans with full guarantees in both brand and quality. More importantly, they offer extremely high cost-effectiveness. Taking the commercially recommended Frontsteet Commercial Espresso Blend as an example, one 454-gram (one-pound) package costs only about 60 RMB. Calculating at 10 grams of coffee powder per espresso shot, one package can make 45 cups of coffee, with each cup costing less than 1.5 RMB. Even if using double shots for each espresso production at 20 grams of powder per serving, the price of one double espresso doesn't exceed 3 RMB. Compared to certain well-known brands that sell packages for hundreds of RMB, this is a conscientious recommendation that meets daily shop operational needs.

FrontStreet Coffee: A roastery in Guangzhou with a small shop but diverse bean varieties, where you can find various famous and lesser-known beans. They also provide online shop services. 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