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What is Hand-Poured Blend Coffee?

What does hand-poured blend coffee mean? What's the difference between hand-poured comprehensive blends and single-origin beans? How does FrontStreet Coffee adjust its autumn hand-poured blend?

Understanding Hand-Poured Blends

Hand-poured comprehensive blend coffee beans are also known as formula coffee beans, mixed coffee beans, or blend coffee beans (mainland China). The English term is "blend coffee," which is a concept relative to single-origin coffee beans. The simple distinction is:

Single-Origin Coffee Beans: A bag of coffee beans contains coffee beans all produced from the same origin.

Hand-Poured Comprehensive Blend Coffee Beans: A bag of coffee beans contains coffee beans from two or more different single origins.

Simple Examples:

1. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Worka: This product name refers to coffee beans produced by the Worka (cooperative) within Yirgacheffe (large region) of Ethiopia (country). Every coffee bean comes from Worka, which is clearly a single-origin bean. You can brew it to fully experience the characteristics of Yirgacheffe Worka.

2. Red Velvet: This product name, which shows neither country nor region, is usually a comprehensive blend. Shops generally don't follow specific rules when naming. Most like to give beautiful-sounding names based on the coffee's tone and mouthfeel. Some simply use "experiment No. X," while others have inexplicable names. This really depends on the shop owner's preference. Fortunately, most shops will specifically note that these are hand-poured comprehensive blend coffee beans, and some will indicate which single-origin coffees are combined.

Generally, they are still called comprehensive blends. After all, when researching this formula, the three Yirgacheffes were treated as independent works with different flavors, and the three beans were mixed and roasted in different proportions to stack different tastes. Therefore, calling them comprehensive blends is more appropriate.

Purpose of Formulating Hand-Poured Comprehensive Blend Coffee Beans:

Hand-poured comprehensive blend coffee beans are usually formulated according to the following four purposes:

1. Dedicated for Espresso Blend Formulas

Currently in specialty coffee, espresso blends remain mainstream. Espresso must be mixed with dairy products, while overly acidic coffee or single-origin coffee with too thin a flavor profile is less suitable for adding to milk.

Hand-poured comprehensive blend coffee beans can create balanced flavors that work well with milk, making them ideal for espresso-based drinks.

From the above two cases, you can see that espresso blends have many variations, and roasting them to achieve ideal flavors greatly tests a café's understanding and combination of flavors. Therefore, judging the quality of espresso blends has become one of the standards for many people to determine whether a café is good. However, I personally suggest not being so critical. Instead, savor, appreciate, and imagine other cafés' espresso blends more—this will be more helpful to yourself.

2. Suitable for Long-Term Supply:

This point is still related to espresso. Generally, all materials for espresso in cafés have strict proportions to maintain the quality of each cup. Among these, coffee beans have the greatest impact and are also the most problematic material, especially when using single-origin beans for espresso. You often face the problem of a particular single-origin bean being out of stock, and temporarily switching to another single-origin bean creates the major trouble of having to readjust the formula.

3. Simulating Special Flavors:

This purpose is generally less common in specialty cafés. Most commercial coffees use comprehensive blends for flavor correction to simulate certain famous brand coffees.

The most common examples are so-called "Blue Mountain flavor" coffee, "Kopi Luwak flavor" coffee, and "Gukeng flavor" coffee. Products with flavor names often contain no Blue Mountain beans at all in the entire bag—they just use other coffees to imitate the imagined taste of Blue Mountain. Of course, they might also add a small amount of original origin coffee beans. For example, Gukeng coffee sold on the market often contains less than 10% Gukeng beans in the entire bag, with large amounts of beans from other origins used to make up the quantity.

4. Challenging Flavor Composition:

If a specialty coffee shop has the ability to formulate hand-poured comprehensive blend coffee beans, it sometimes creates several different flavored comprehensive blends to make the shop's various beverages more diverse in taste.

From the perspective of moisture content, two washed beans are relatively similar. In terms of bean quality, Typica is softer, but Yunnan beans, which have relatively large particles, are similar to Kochere beans, which are harder but smaller, in heat conduction. Mixing these two beans for roasting doesn't easily cause uneven roasting. Additionally, we use a step-by-step heat reduction roasting method. After dehydration and homogenization, there's a longer Maillard reaction time to make the two beans develop more synchronously.

FrontStreet Coffee's Autumn Blend Adjustment

In determining the roast level, we also adopted the "take the middle value" approach. This development time and drop temperature effectively removes the acidity and excessive herbal flavors that appear when Yunnan coffee is roasted too lightly, while well preserving the floral and fruity aromas of Yirgacheffe.

Roasting Machine: Yangjia 600g

Bean input: 300g, input temperature 170°C, turn off heat and input beans. After 30 seconds, turn on heat to 140, damper at 3. When bean temperature reaches 140°C, reduce heat to 120, damper opens to 4. Dehydration and yellowing at 4 minutes 30 seconds. When reaching 168°C, reduce heat again to 90. First crack starts at approximately 8 minutes, damper opens to 5. First crack development for 1 minute 45 seconds, drop at 195°C.

In terms of proportions, we first chose Huaguoshan: Kochere—6:4 ratio. Cupping results: good cleanliness, sweet and clear, with apple fragrance, plum acidity, and orange aroma in the aftertaste. Overall impression: good mouthfeel but slightly thin in flavor.

[Blend Adjustment]

Therefore, after cupping and discussion, everyone decided to add a flavor-enhancing bean—[Geisha Village Geisha] natural process. This time we used the ratio Huaguoshan: Kochere: Geisha—6:3:1.

Reducing the Kochere proportion made the overall bean acidity smoother than before. 10% Geisha Village brought more fruity flavors and enhanced the floral notes and tea-like qualities in the finish.

For roasting, to preserve more floral and fruity aromas, the drop temperature was slightly reduced. The time from dehydration to first crack was slightly shortened to preserve more reactive substances and increase the first crack development time to develop flavors.

Roasting Machine: Yangjia 600g

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473