What's the Difference Between Single-Origin Coffee Beans and Blends? What's the Difference Between Specialty Coffee and Commercial Coffee? Why is Pour-Over Coffee More Expensive Than Espresso?

It's not difficult to notice that in most coffee shops or coffee chain brands, pour-over coffee is generally more expensive than espresso-based coffee. Common pour-over prices range from 30 to 50 yuan, with some even reaching 100 yuan or higher. Meanwhile, espresso-based drinks like lattes, flat whites, and Americanos typically remain in the 10 to 30 yuan range. This leaves many friends wondering: "Hey! My latte has milk added, so how can it be cheaper than this pour-over that only uses water?" (Just kidding)

Alright, take three seconds to think about it, and then you can compare with FrontStreet Coffee's answers to see if they match the factors you had in mind!

1. Coffee Bean Grade

The price difference between these two types mainly comes from the grade of coffee beans they use. Pour-over coffee primarily uses single-origin beans that express flavor characteristics, while espresso-based coffee mainly uses commercial blends with higher stability. Because espresso-based coffee has a broader audience and has become a daily staple for most people, compared to the diverse choices of pour-over coffee, businesses need to maintain a consistent flavor for espresso-based coffee over the long term.

However, coffee beans are agricultural products, and their flavors change with the climate variations in growing environments each year—simply put, they depend on nature and are very unstable. Therefore, a solution is needed to ensure that coffee beans used for espresso can maintain a stable flavor for an extended period! "Blending" is the optimal choice to accomplish this feat.

By mixing several beans from different regions and with different processing methods, not only can their own defects be compensated for, but the importance of each bean can also be diluted. Even if one particular bean doesn't perform well the following year, its diluted importance allows for replacement with excellent beans from other regions to fill the gaps.

Moreover, to ensure the espresso flavor isn't masked by milk, deeper roasting is required to give the coffee a richer taste that can "compete" with milk. This, in turn, lowers the requirements for the beans, as starting from medium-dark roasts, some of the distinctive flavor characteristics of the beans gradually become buried by the flavors brought about by caramelization reactions.

Therefore, under less "extreme" requirements, most blended beans use commercial coffee beans for combination, offering better cost-effectiveness!

Pour-over coffee can better express the inherent flavor characteristics of coffee beans, so after the concept of specialty coffee emerged, it gradually became representative of making specialty coffee due to its significant advantages. Therefore, in terms of bean selection, pour-over coffee uses higher-grade, single-origin coffee beans with superior flavors. These high-grade, high-quality coffee beans inevitably have corresponding purchase prices. Thus, the level of purchase price determines the selling price, making the price difference between espresso-based and pour-over coffee immediately apparent.

2. Coffee Bean Pricing

Even if espresso-based coffee uses high-quality single-origin beans, its price will still be somewhat lower than pour-over. Because, as mentioned above, for coffee shops, espresso-based coffee has a broader audience, which leads to higher bean consumption for espresso compared to pour-over.

Higher consumption means coffee shops can purchase more beans at once. As we all know the difference between wholesale and retail, the same principle applies to coffee beans.

For coffee beans, the purchase price of 500g and 10kg will certainly not be at the same level. So, just like the first factor, due to differences in procurement costs, the selling prices of products will naturally have certain distinctions!

3. Labor and Time Costs

Finally, there are the labor and time costs! With materials prepared, making a cup of espresso-based coffee conservatively takes about two minutes, while pour-over coffee, with materials ready, takes at least 3-4 minutes to complete. Moreover, during the pour-over coffee preparation, baristas find it difficult to engage in other operations.

This is because pour-over coffee preparation requires attention to many details—the state of the beans, the height of water pouring, the drip time, and so on. All these factors require the barista to focus on the pour-over brewing process.

The requirements for making espresso-based coffee are relatively less demanding, as the extraction parameters for espresso have already been calibrated during morning testing. Now, the barista only needs to place materials in fixed positions, leaving the rest to the machine.

During this time, depending on our proficiency with the operation, we can multitask and handle other operations. Therefore, relatively speaking, the cost of making espresso-based coffee is much lower than pour-over coffee. This is also why many coffee shops don't offer pour-over coffee—it's time-consuming and labor-intensive.

So now everyone understands why pour-over coffee is more expensive than espresso-based coffee! It's not just about the grade of the coffee beans themselves, but also the differences brought by coffee bean procurement costs and labor time costs.

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