What is a Coffee Combo? Which Beans are Suitable for Coffee Combinations? What are the Requirements for Espresso in Making Latte?

The Rise of Coffee Combo

Like specialty coffee, Combo has become incredibly popular in the coffee scene in recent years. Because it allows customers to experience multiple different flavors at once, this presentation method has been warmly welcomed by customers since it moved from competitions to coffee shops.

However, as Combo has spread, problems have emerged. Many friends have discovered that the Combo made with their own coffee beans isn't particularly impressive—either the Americano turns out too bitter, or the latte lacks flavor, making it difficult to achieve balance. This has led them to seek out FrontStreet Coffee, asking what coffee beans are best for Combo and how to make it delicious. To answer these two questions, we need to first understand what Combo is, because knowing yourself and your enemy leads to victory in every battle. Next, FrontStreet Coffee will share what Combo is all about!

What is a Coffee Combo?

The term "Combo" means "combination," and what we commonly call Combo actually stands for Coffee Combo, which translates to "coffee combination." This coffee combination doesn't simply refer to combining different types of coffee, but rather using a single bean to extract multiple espresso shots, then creating different coffee beverages from them for pairing—what's known as "one bean, multiple drinks." The most common combination is undoubtedly "one black, one white"—splitting one espresso shot into two portions, with one used to make an Americano (black) and the other made into a milk coffee (white).

Of course, some shops divide the espresso into more than two portions, creating specialty drinks in addition to Americanos and milk coffees. But most businesses still focus on Americano and milk coffee combinations because they aren't too complicated. The core of a coffee shop's Combo comes from the coffee beans used. The reason for using one bean to make different types of coffee is to showcase the flavor characteristics of that bean itself, tasting how the bean performs under different preparations. So compared to the milk coffee and Americano produced, this combination is more like a performance using the bean—a stage for expression. However, this often leads to misunderstandings about Combo, with people thinking it should be made with single-origin coffee.

But in reality, what Combo aims to convey in competitions is simply the contestant's grasp of the bean and the display of the coffee's characteristic flavors—it's a technical assessment for the user and a quality test for the bean. In other words, as long as people can taste the bean's flavor characteristics and the overall high degree of compatibility in this combination, then whether you choose a blend or single-origin bean is perfectly acceptable.

Choosing Beans for Coffee Combo

So how should you select coffee beans for Combo? To best showcase the inherent flavor characteristics of coffee beans, we should ideally exclude dark-roasted coffee beans from our options. Because when coffee beans are roasted too dark, the bean's characteristic flavors are gradually diminished through prolonged chemical reactions or masked by bitter notes, making it difficult to display their flavor attributes properly. Under this limitation, we should ideally choose medium or medium-light roasted coffee beans. This isn't to say that dark-roasted coffee beans can't be used—just that they're relatively less suitable for coffee shop Combo offerings.

Additionally, if you want the coffee you make to have more prominent flavor expression, you can choose deeply fermented natural, honey-processed, or anaerobic beans. Because these types of beans will have more outstanding flavor expression, but relatively speaking, the fermented taste in the coffee will also vary depending on the bean's fermentation degree. So how you balance these trade-offs depends on your own choice. After discussing bean selection, let's move on to espresso extraction. Friends working in coffee shops probably know that the daily morning tests when opening the shop don't just test the taste of espresso—they also make a latte to test the compatibility between espresso and milk flavors. Why is this?

Because delicious espresso isn't necessarily suitable for making lattes—both because coffee needs bitter compounds to counteract the taste of large amounts of milk, and because overly prominent acidity in coffee becomes very abrupt when combined with milk. Therefore, you need to make a latte to taste whether the espresso extraction needs adjustment. This same principle applies to Combo preparation. Moreover, if we choose medium-light roasted coffee beans, conventional extraction will easily extract rich acidity, and highly acidic coffee is more difficult to pair with milk. Therefore, we need to increase extraction to reduce the proportion of acidity in the coffee, allowing it to pair better with milk!

Perfecting Your Coffee Combo

The last thing to note is that when making the coffee in a Combo, we don't need to completely follow the original ratios (referring to the ratio of coffee to milk/water)! Because we need to highlight the bean's characteristic flavors, the proportions of milk and water can be appropriately reduced. For example, if the original Americano used a 1:4 ratio, then when making a Combo, we could reduce it to 1:3 to 1:3.5, giving the bean's flavors better room to express themselves. (PS: The extraction dose and liquid volume should ideally be increased accordingly, otherwise it will be difficult to fill the cup!)

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473