Which is Better: Blended Coffee or Single Origin Coffee? Are More Coffee Beans Always Better in Blends?

Yesterday afternoon, a customer friend asked FrontStreet Coffee: "If you blend more than thirty types of beans from your blackboard together, would the brewed coffee be incredibly delicious?"

This is actually not the first time FrontStreet Coffee has received such a question. Since many merchants have begun promoting blends with four or even more varieties, newcomers often think: the more types of coffee beans used in a blend, the better. However, this is not necessarily the case. The quality of blended coffee cannot be equated with the number of coffee varieties used in the blend. The main reason for this misconception, besides being influenced by merchants' promotions, is an incomplete understanding of the concept of blending.

So today, FrontStreet Coffee will share what blended coffee is, and then use a blend of more than thirty coffee beans to demonstrate why the number of blended coffee beans is not necessarily better the more there are!

What is Blended Coffee?

Blended coffee, also known as mixed coffee, is a type of coffee made by mixing two or more different beans. Although we only need to mix different coffee beans together to create a blend, things are often not as simple as imagined! Because blending is a technical task~

Blending can achieve many possibilities that are difficult to realize with single-origin beans of the same price range! Through blending, we can create beans that achieve our desired effects. These include but are not limited to: creating a "hexagonal warrior" that excels in all aspects, with outstanding flavor and mouthfeel; or creating a high-value coffee with low cost but impressive flavor through blending; or enabling the produced coffee to have higher consistency... As we all know, coffee is an agricultural product, and its taste is affected by many factors. So even the same coffee beans from the same plot will have different quality and taste in each batch compared to the previous one. If we use single-origin coffee beans for coffee production, then every time we change batches, the consistency of the product will be affected by the change in taste. And blending can solve the problem of inconsistent taste!

By blending several different coffee beans together, the flavor of the coffee is no longer from a single source, because its flavor is composed of several coffee beans together. This is also equivalent to diluting the importance of each bean. When the quality of a certain bean in the blend does not meet expectations in the new harvest season, or when it becomes unavailable, it can be replaced with other similar beans to maintain taste stability. (There will be changes, but not significant.)

In addition, we can also create a high-value coffee bean through blending. The so-called high value means that the performance of this bean will far exceed that of single-origin beans at the same price. Because blending can leverage strengths to compensate for weaknesses, we can use the advantages of one bean to fill the shortcomings of another coffee bean, while the other coffee bean happens to have advantages that this coffee bean lacks. Combined, they become a "hexagonal warrior" that is excellent in all aspects but not high in cost (for example, the Frontsteet Sunshine Blend in FrontStreet Coffee's bean selection is like this!). Or create entirely new flavors through the fusion of flavors...

The Experiment: Blending 30+ Coffee Beans

In summary, we can know that blending is a way to avoid the defects of single bean varieties by combining the characteristics of different beans, rather than simply stacking the number of varieties. So what would happen if we just stack the number of varieties? Let FrontStreet Coffee conduct an experiment!

FrontStreet Coffee took 3 beans from each of the more than 30 different coffees sold in the store to form a 15g blend, and then "cooked" it through pour-over. The extraction parameters are the usual formula for brewing light-roast coffee, but since the purpose of this experiment is not brewing, the parameters and process will be omitted directly.

This special blend of coffee beans can still smell some berry and spice flavors when ground into powder, but after brewing into coffee, almost no flavor can be tasted. Although it has a good mouthfeel and a long aftertaste, there are no prominent flavors, very messy and vague, and so is the taste.

The reason for this situation is that too many coffee beans were used, and in equal quantities, so no single coffee bean could serve as the core to support the taste of the entire cup of coffee. Therefore, various flavors cancel each other out, resulting in vague flavors. If this is hard to understand, then you can think of the play-doh you've played with before! Everyone has played with play-doh, right! When we knead various colors of play-doh together, we don't get the imagined colorful play-doh, but instead a single grayish-brown color. Although the principles are different, the logic is similar, and the same applies to blended coffee.

Why More Beans Don't Mean Better Coffee

When we use more coffee beans in a blend, we need to pay more attention to the proportion between beans and the degree of compatibility of their characteristics. Otherwise, it will weaken the characteristics of the beans and achieve the opposite effect. This will greatly test the blender's understanding of each coffee bean! Then, the more types of beans used, the more complex the blending process becomes. This is not only because we need to adjust the characteristics and quantity of each bean, but also because the size and density of the beans are different, so they require different roasting curves.

Simply put, if you want to get the ultimate experience, then the roasting degree between beans should at least be similar, if not identical. To achieve this, we need to adopt post-roast blending. Post-roast blending refers to blending after each bean has been individually roasted. When more types of beans are used in the blend, the more roasting batches we need. Although the blending process is more complex, when there are too many types of beans, the actual effect obtained is not proportional to the effort invested. Therefore, blended coffee is not necessarily better the more types of coffee beans used! Nowadays, the blends we can see mostly control the number of beans between 2-5 types, which is the result after weighing the pros and cons.

- END -

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473