Which Tastes Better: Blend or SOE Americano? How to Choose Coffee Beans When Ordering

Choosing Your Espresso Beans: Blend vs. Single Origin

When you walk into a coffee shop and order an Americano, what beans are available for selection? Nowadays, mainstream espresso coffee beans used in cafés typically fall into two categories: blends or Single Origin Espresso (SOE). So what's the difference between these two types of coffee beans when used to make espresso?

Traditional Italian Espresso

Let's first talk about traditional Italian espresso, what we commonly call Espresso. It refers to a coffee with strong, intense, and rich flavors. Most espresso lovers pursue intense, low-acidity coffee profiles. Another characteristic is its rich crema, captivating aroma, smooth texture, and intense yet balanced flavor. Additionally, our daily milk-based coffee drinks like lattes and cappuccinos all use espresso as the fundamental base, adding different proportions of milk or milk foam.

Generally speaking, brewing a standard espresso requires meeting the following conditions: A. One espresso shot should be 25-35ml. B. Coffee dose depends on the coffee and grind size. C. Extraction water temperature should be between 90.5-96°C. D. Pressure should be 8.5-9.5 atmospheres. E. Coffee extraction time should ideally be between 20-30 seconds, though this is not strictly regulated.

These conditions may seem simple, but most home espresso machines cannot achieve this goal, which is why cafés must equip themselves with slightly more professional espresso machines.

Espresso Blends

Espresso blends, also called mixed coffee, simply put, are coffees where different coffee beans are professionally mixed by baristas to achieve specific flavor profiles. More traditional blending goals typically focus on balanced flavors and rich crema, with medium or medium-dark roasted coffee beans being the preferred choice.

These coffee beans from different regions, processing methods, and flavor profiles all possess varying regional characteristics. Even if the same coffee bean tastes good this harvest season, there's no guarantee that next year's terroir and climate will produce the same effect. The benefit of blending is leveraging the different characteristics of coffee beans, playing to their strengths, compensating for weaknesses, and harmonizing them to create more stable, rich, and balanced flavors, thereby ensuring a certain degree of consistency in the final product.

There are two blending methods: raw blending, which means mixing different green coffee beans together before roasting; and post-blending, where different roasted coffee beans are roasted separately, potentially to different roast levels, then combined in specific proportions after roasting. Neither method is inherently better or worse—it entirely depends on the roaster's understanding of the coffee beans and blending goals.

General blending practices typically involve a base flavor and a complementary flavor. For example, FrontStreet Coffee's store uses the Warm Sun blend, which is 70% Honduras + 30% Ethiopia Yirgacheffe. Honduras provides the main flavor profile, tending toward: chocolate, cream, vanilla, fermented wine notes, and citrus. This highlights vanilla and barrel-fermented wine flavors, along with the berry-like acidity and aroma of Yirgacheffe. This enhances the nutty flavors while adding the aroma and acidity from the Yirgacheffe region, increasing the coffee's layered complexity. When made into milk coffee, the flavors have more dimension, and you can feel caramel-like sweetness without adding sugar.

FrontStreet Coffee has another Arabica + Robusta blend. Besides the base Brazil and Mandheling, it adds 20% Robusta. Espresso made with added Robusta generally has a deeper color, richer crema, and higher sugar content, which offers great convenience when making lattes and also satisfies many people's special requirements for crema.

Robusta has higher caffeine content but excels in having richer crema than Arabica. The darker the roast, the darker the crema color becomes, and the body becomes fuller, which is the significance of Robusta in blended coffee beans. This blend combining three origins presents flavors of: enticing aroma, rich crema, intense and mellow, heavy nutty chocolate flavors, with strong sweetness when paired with milk.

Single Origin Espresso (SOE)

With the development of specialty coffee, SOE—Single Origin Espresso—has become popular in the market today. This can be understood as taking single-origin coffee beans from pour-over specialty coffee, adjusting the roast profile, and using them to produce espresso. Coffee beans with strong flavor characteristics, when made into espresso, further amplify the origin's flavors to the extreme, such as aroma, sweetness, and acidity.

When selecting SOE coffee beans, similar to pour-over, you need to focus on the dominant flavor of the single origin. Most Brazilian coffee has chocolate and nutty notes, while Ethiopian coffee beans mostly have fruity flavors. For example, the citrus flavors of Yirgacheffe, the berry notes of Kenya, etc. For espresso, compared to blends, SOE typically uses coffee beans with higher flavor recognition to create uniquely characteristic espresso. There's greater emphasis on identifying coffee through taste, making it easier to taste clearer regional flavors. If you choose single-origin beans with weaker flavor intensity, they'll be unremarkable and taste like water.

Blend vs. SOE: Which to Choose?

Choosing blended coffee offers more balance and stability, with flavors that have broader audience acceptance, making regional characteristics less identifiable, with higher body. This is why most coffee shops choose blended coffee varieties for their offerings.

Whether a good espresso or Americano can meet your expectations, there's no strict standard for which coffee beans to use. The main consideration for both is having clear flavor preferences and making choices based on your taste combined with origin and roast level. There's no question of which is better between blends and SOE—it's about personal preference.

FrontStreet Coffee

No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province

Important Notice :

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Tel:020 38364473