Is SOE just single origin coffee? Why is SOE Americano too sour and SOE latte too bitter?

The Rise of Single-Origin Coffee in Chinese Cafés

As the specialty coffee scene continues to flourish in China, high-quality single-origin beans from various regions around the world have frequently appeared on many café menus. Not only does each coffee come with detailed traceability information, but many single-origin batches also leave lasting impressions with their unique aromas. For instance, FrontStreet Coffee's bean menu features an entire large blackboard listing nearly 50 products, ranging from fruity acidity to sweet bitterness, from refreshing to intense flavors, offering customers a wide selection.

From Traditional Blends to SOE

In the past, people making espresso typically had only a few simple blend options to choose from, mostly dark roasts that produced coffee with relatively strong body and more monolithic flavors. Today, with an increasing variety of beans available, many coffee enthusiasts want to try using single-origin coffee beans to make SOE (Single Origin Espresso), hoping to extract a distinctive espresso shot.

What is SOE?

Let's review this concept once again: SOE stands for Single Origin Espresso, which translates to "espresso made from single-origin coffee beans." The key emphasis here is on the term "single origin."

To put it simply, when you use 25 yuan of FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe daily beans to make an espresso, it's called "Yirgacheffe SOE"; when you use 158 yuan of FrontStreet Coffee's Blue Mountain No. 1 coffee beans to make an Americano, that becomes "Blue Mountain SOE Americano"; if your budget is generous and you choose the most expensive package of FrontStreet Coffee's Emerald Red Geisha coffee and make a latte, this milk coffee can be named "Red Label Geisha SOE Latte."

Choosing the Right Coffee Beans for SOE

It's important to understand that whether using blends or single-origin beans, they must endure the high temperature and high pressure of espresso machines, as well as the extraction conditions of fine grinding, allowing hot water to penetrate the coffee puck in just a few tens of seconds to become espresso. This process also amplifies the inherent flavors of the coffee beans throughout the extraction stage.

The most common scenario is that when using too lightly roasted single-origin beans, the espresso's acidity spikes dramatically while the aroma remains flat; when extracting with too darkly roasted coffee, the espresso is left with only bitterness and scorching, with no distinctive flavors可言. Therefore, to make a delicious SOE, choosing the right coffee beans is undoubtedly the primary condition. Based on FrontStreet Coffee's experience, we can start from three aspects: the coffee bean's origin, roast level, and processing method, which can help us more quickly identify the SOE type that suits us.

For those who prefer fresh, sweet, and acidic profiles, you can prioritize focusing on natural processed single origins from African regions. For example, Ethiopia's Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Guji are currently representative single-origin regions on the market. Brewed coffee from these areas typically exhibits higher sweetness with rich fruit and floral notes. However, since these beans are mostly used for pour-over, cold brew, or clever dripper, they are usually lightly or medium-light roasted. If directly applied to espresso extraction, they can easily result in under-extraction, coffee spray, and thin crema.

Therefore, for customers who love Ethiopian origins and need SOE, FrontStreet Coffee has specially selected three natural processed single-origin coffees and adjusted a separate espresso roasting curve for them, introducing HK SOE Coffee Beans, Chaka SOE Coffee Beans, and Red Cherry SOE Coffee Beans.

If you prefer espresso with rich fruit aromas and rounded sweetness, then high-altitude beans from some Central and South American countries might be your preference. Coffees from countries like Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Peru are typically medium-roasted to present the sweet aromatics of their origins/varieties and caramel notes, making them compatible with multiple extraction methods.

Additionally, if you want to maximize the fruitiness of your SOE coffee, you might start with single-origin beans processed using natural, honey, or anaerobic natural methods. For example, FrontStreet Coffee's Colombia Sidra uses double anaerobic natural processing, and the resulting SOE Americano has distinct blueberry juice, passion fruit, and ripe grape flavors; another SOE latte made from Colombia's Ombligon, also processed with anaerobic natural method, offers notes of orange, nuts, and milk candy.

If the single-origin coffees mentioned above aren't to your liking, or if you don't particularly enjoy acidic coffee, then you might want to look for single-origin coffees from Asia and South America, preferably those roasted to medium-dark levels. For example, espresso made with FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Cerrado and Colombia Reina庄园 beans can exhibit low acidity, no bitterness, and a balanced profile.

How to Make Delicious SOE Coffee?

Actually, making delicious SOE isn't difficult. Just like adjusting regular espresso, the first step in making SOE is still to apply the basic formula of "1:2 coffee dose to liquid ratio" and control the time within 25-35 seconds. The grind size depends on whether the flow rate can fall within this time range.

For example, when FrontStreet Coffee uses 20g of HK SOE coffee grounds to extract 40g of coffee liquid (18g of coffee grounds would correspond to 36g of coffee liquid), if the time is far below 25 seconds, it means the grind is too coarse and needs to be adjusted finer; if the coffee liquid flows out in about 30 seconds, it means the grind size is roughly correct and no adjustment is needed.

Since SOE is ultimately used to make specialty coffee drinks like Americanos, lattes, and flat whites, once the espresso is determined, we need to make some minor adjustments to the extraction plan based on the SOE's own flavor profile.

If you're using medium or medium-light roasted Ethiopian coffee beans with regional flavors of floral, bright fruit acidity, and berries—these fresh profiles—the resulting espresso tends to have thin or even no crema. At this point, we can increase the coffee dose by 0.3-0.5g to compensate for the aromatic compounds in the coffee. For example, FrontStreet Coffee uses 20.5g of HK SOE coffee grounds to extract 40g of coffee liquid in 31 seconds as a base. The resulting Americano can exhibit a refreshing sweet and sour taste, and the coffee concentration in the latte will also be enhanced, allowing for better appreciation of the aroma when espresso combines with milk.

When we make SOE using fruit-forward single-origin beans with certain fermentation notes, the espresso will naturally have rich sweet and sour flavors. If you want your SOE Americano to present rich aromas, you might consider increasing the espresso yield by 3-5g, which can enhance the coffee's sweetness and create a more lingering aftertaste. If you're making an SOE latte and want to highlight the single-origin coffee's aroma, simply reduce the amount of milk. If you originally used 200g of fresh milk, you could reduce this to 160-180g.

The last common scenario is when using medium-dark roasted single-origin beans, the SOE exhibits harsh flavors like rubber, hay, smoke, and charcoal. This indicates that the espresso is likely over-extracted, which is why the resulting Americano or latte becomes difficult to drink. The solution is simple—reduce the espresso yield by 3-5g, which can effectively eliminate undesirable aftertastes.

However, if your coffee has weak aroma, short aftertaste, and noticeable acidity, it means the SOE might be under-extracted. You need to slightly adjust the grind finer to extend the extraction time by 2-3 seconds, thereby ensuring appropriate coffee concentration.

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473