Is SOE Coffee Good and What Are Its Characteristics? Why Are SOE Espresso Beans Light Roasted and How to Make Them?

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"Passing by a coffee shop, you might notice below the espresso menu: [Add SOE for an additional 3 yuan]." What exactly is SOE, and does it make the coffee taste better? In this Barista Training installment, we'll explore what SOE is all about.

What is SOE?

SOE stands for "Single Origin Espresso," which means "single-origin espresso coffee." Its focus is to highlight the coffee flavors from a specific origin, essentially using single-origin coffee beans to make espresso. In contrast, there are espresso blends. FrontStreet Coffee has repeatedly emphasized that coffee blends strike a balance between flavor, consistency, and price. That is, if you want to prioritize flavor and consistency, the price will be higher; whereas if you prioritize price and stability, you'll have to sacrifice flavor.

However, SOE is different. Let's first understand its background. SOE has only gained popularity in recent years. Single-origin coffee beans can exhibit various regional characteristic flavors when used in pour-over brewing. Combined with the diversity of information dissemination media in recent years, information about using single-origin coffee beans in world barista competitions has spread widely. Consequently, applying single-origin coffee beans to espresso has become a trend.

Is SOE Specialty Coffee?

This question is essentially equivalent to asking: Are single-origin coffees specialty coffees? The answer is not entirely yes. When the concept of specialty coffee was first introduced in the 1970s and 1980s, the primary goal was yield. Coffee beans were collected and processed centrally in production areas and exported for foreign exchange in the form of countries. Imagine mixing coffee beans of uneven quality together—it would be fortunate if there were no obvious negative flavors.

Back then, Ms. Erna Knutsen proposed that specialty coffee is "coffee beans cultivated in unique microclimates and geographical conditions of production areas, possessing regional flavors." The essential meaning is that good coffee should not be mixed with large quantities of commodity beans but should be separated. This aimed to distinguish it from the bulk commercial coffee traded on the New York Futures Exchange market.

Therefore, specialty coffee beans require good varieties, good environments, and meticulous cultivation to produce high-quality, flavorful coffee beans. Single-origin coffee beans merely refer to coffee beans from a single production area that possess regional flavors. There are no quality requirements—for example, FrontStreet Coffee's Indonesian Lintong Mandheling G2 is a single-origin coffee bean, but not necessarily a specialty coffee bean (depending on cupping scores). Of course, the single-origin coffee we drink in coffee shops is almost 100% specialty coffee beans.

What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of SOE?

In FrontStreet Coffee's view, SOE has been labeled since its birth as coffee with good regional flavors, which means the quality of the selected coffee beans must be guaranteed. How can we highlight the advantages of SOE coffee? The answer is, of course, that the flavor must be outstanding—the kind that catches your eye. This means having good beans isn't enough; suitable roasting is also necessary.

Like espresso blends, to ensure stability and compensate for deficiencies in coffee bean quality, the roast level is deepened, thus stabilizing the flavor. However, SOE coffee needs to exhibit eye-catching flavors and cannot be treated like blends. Nor can you directly use light-roasted single-origin coffee beans meant for pour-over to make SOE—too light a roast will result in an overly sour and astringent espresso. Therefore, SOE beans require a unique roasting curve.

Making delicious SOE isn't as simple as selecting a high-quality single-origin coffee bean. It requires countless roasting experiments and extraction adjustments to achieve ideal results (sometimes after several roasts and extractions, you might discover that this particular bean isn't suitable for making espresso). Espresso can amplify the flavors of a single-origin coffee bean, but it also amplifies its defects. For example, some coffee beans with good flavors might lack in mouthfeel. Therefore, in some shops that offer SOE, you can only find 1-2 types of SOE single-origin beans for customers to choose from.

Of course, a latte or Americano made with SOE will have flavors incomparable to blended coffee. For example, an Americano made with properly extracted FrontStreet Coffee Yirgacheffe Gedeb SOE can distinctly present citrus, floral, and honey notes, especially the lingering aroma in the cup after drinking—something that some bitterness-focused blended coffees cannot achieve.

Is SOE Better than Blended Coffee Beans?

A common phenomenon in the market is that most blended beans aim for price advantages and flavor stability, resulting in relatively moderate flavors. SOE, on the other hand, is meant to distinguish itself from these types of blends, presenting memorable flavors, thus prioritizing flavor, which naturally comes at a higher price.

However, this common phenomenon doesn't prove that SOE is entirely superior to blends. When FrontStreet Coffee was developing the Sunflower Warm Sunshine blend, they once considered making a Sherry SOE coffee bean. During tasting, it exhibited strong wine notes but lacked sweetness and mouthfeel. So they thought of adding FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe Red Cherry to increase the sweetness.

Finally, through different ratio tests, they determined a blend of 70% Sherry and 30% Yirgacheffe, creating the Warm Sunshine blend with a completely new mouthfeel. The resulting espresso not only has better flavor than the Sherry SOE but also possesses an aroma complexity that conventional dark-roasted blends lack.

In conclusion, the emergence of SOE also represents the increasing quality requirements for espresso beans, which overall benefits the development of espresso.

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