What are the Key Differences Between Single-Origin, Espresso Blend, and SOE Coffee Beans?

Understanding Coffee Bean Categories: Single Origin, Blends, and SOE

Today's coffee market offers three main categories of coffee beans: single origin, blends, and the increasingly popular SOE (Single Origin Espresso). Newcomers to the coffee world often struggle to distinguish between these categories, leading to confusion when selecting beans for purchase.

Today, FrontStreet Coffee will share the differences between these three coffee bean categories and their primary uses!

Single Origin Coffee Beans

Many people assume that "single origin" refers to a single variety of coffee beans. Not quite! That interpretation is too narrow. Single origin coffee beans actually come from a single origin, variety, or batch—not necessarily a single variety! Many coffee farms grow different coffee varieties in mixed plots and sell them together, so the description "single variety" cannot encompass the full picture.

Single origin coffee is the cornerstone of the specialty coffee wave, also known as specialty coffee! After Erna Knutsen proposed the concept of "specialty coffee" in 1978, coffee farmers shifted their cultivation philosophy from prioritizing quantity over quality to focusing on quality-driven regional coffee beans.

These coffee beans can be traced back to their detailed source information: variety, growing region, processing method, altitude, and more. This allows people to better appreciate and understand the unique flavor characteristics of each growing region. For example, Yirgacheffe and Blue Mountain are representative coffees that showcase their regional flavors. Most importantly, the specialty coffee concept has increased farmers' cultivation income, enabling them to better invest in quality-focused approaches. Generally, single origin coffee beans are primarily used for brewing methods that best showcase the coffee's inherent flavors, such as pour-over, siphon, and clever dripper—focusing on black coffee experiences. They are also used in espresso coffee, which brings us to our next topic: "SOE."

SOE (Single Origin Espresso)

SOE stands for "Single Origin Espresso," where Single Origin refers to a single growing region, and Espresso is the familiar concentrated coffee. Combined, it means espresso made from coffee beans of a single origin.

Essentially, these are single origin coffee beans, but their purpose isn't for drip coffee extraction methods like pour-over; instead, they're used to make espresso. The reason for distinguishing between beans used for single origin and SOE lies in the fact that some beans require a darker roast level for espresso preparation!

Some beans' roast levels cannot be universally applied to both single origin and espresso. For instance, if you use a very lightly roasted bean directly in an espresso machine extraction, the resulting coffee will exhibit significantly more acidity than when brewed as single origin coffee! When acidity becomes too pronounced and concentrated, it creates an unpleasant sensory experience. Therefore, we need to reduce the bean's acidity, and the best method is to increase the roast level, which helps lower the acidity. This is why SOE beans are distinguished from single origin beans—they can highlight regional flavor characteristics while being suitable for espresso preparation. That's SOE!

Blended Coffee Beans

Blended coffee is straightforward! It combines two or more single origin beans, and many people also refer to it as "blend coffee." The concept of blending originates from this principle: what do you want, and what are your needs?

There are many types of coffee blends. The most commonly understood approach combines the strengths of different beans to compensate for each other's weaknesses, creating a balanced product. Additionally, blending can merge distinct flavor characteristics from multiple beans to create an entirely new flavor profile! For example, if we blend Dorothy, which has prominent peach flavors, with Guodingding, known for its distinctive green tea notes, what would we get? A completely new bean with white peach oolong tea flavors!

Blue Mountain, known as the "Coffee Emperor," is famously expensive! So how can people enjoy Blue Mountain's flavor without spending a fortune? You guessed it—blending! We can blend several non-Blue Mountain beans to replicate Blue Mountain's texture and taste (the legendary Blue Mountain-style coffee)! We can also add a small amount of Blue Mountain beans to a blend, creating "Blue Mountain Blend." Essentially, blending is a creative expression—your ideas and familiarity with beans determine the kind of blend coffee you can create. Blended coffee beans are primarily used for espresso and rarely for single origin brewing, which is why people often refer to them as "espresso blend beans"!

However, there's a misconception to note: SOE or single origin beans aren't necessarily superior to blended beans. After all, some sophisticated blends use high-quality single origin beans. For example, FrontStreet Coffee's Warm Sun Blend uses 70% Honduras Sherry beans blended with 30% Ethiopia Red Cherry, resulting in flavors of butter cookies, whiskey aromatics, and subtle berry acidity. The Dorothy blend mentioned above is similarly crafted. Their calculated cost per serving can be much higher than some single origin beans. Therefore, it's important not to make generalizations!

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

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