Depending on how exposed you are to the coffee world, you may know a lot or a little about coffee beans, where they come from, who roasts them and whether they are a blend or a single origin.
Now before I delve into this subject, I’m going to put a quick disclaimer out there. This post is going to be a lot about my opinions, many people will disagree with some of the things I say here, and that’s totally ok! In fact if you don’t agree with my thoughts, I encourage you to share your own. I and many others may learn from your thoughts and views on this topic too.
For those that know me personally, know that I have been suffering from a back injury for the past few months. Well lucky me, I have to go to a physio every week, just by chance my physiotherapist is a coffee enthusiast like myself. Shout out to Kent for being a great physio and a passionate person to bounce coffee ideas off. This has lead to some great chats about all things coffee (also it makes the whole experience of being squeezed, stretched, pulled ect a little less serious which is nice).
In our exchange of information about coffee, the topic of what blend do I use with milk came up. My response was simple, I really don’t use them, I don’t really like or agree with them. Now it’s not to say that there isn’t some pro’s to be had from blending coffee, helping to cut through milk, having a consistent tasting product on the shelf year round, allowing a roaster to showcase their own individual product, personal flavour profiles and combinations to help set themselves apart to touch on a few.
The reason I don’t agree with them falls into my approach to making coffee, it’s all about consistency, we aren’t aiming to make one great, tasty, perfect coffee, we are aiming to consistently make good coffee to a set and agreed upon standard. The best way to do this, manage and control as many variables as possible. Let’s say you have a 4 bean blend (this amount tends to be pretty popular from roasters around Sydney), to keep it simple let’s say it was evenly distributed between the four beans, let’s pretend my 1kg bag of “coffee with Lars house blend” has 250g of Columbia, 250g of Ethiopia, 250g of Sumatra and 250g of Costa Rica (sounds pretty tasty right). I blend them all up in a bucket then pour them into a bag ready to use. Now I pour these beans into the hopper of the grinder, what’s to say when I grind a dose of 20g to make an espresso that what’s in my basket is still an even 5g of each coffee. All the beans are of different sizes so there is a good chance that the small ones are going to fall to the bottom, the big ones will float to the top and so on. Now already my blend is not what I initially wanted, for all I know I’m drinking 70% Ethiopia coffee with a random spread to make up the other 30%. Then take into account that every bean is going to be roasted to a different development stage (I will say that there is a couple roasters out there that do guarantee all blends are roasted to the same development, but this is very very rare). So what I am getting at here is that one of the beans in the blend let’s say Costa Rica may require 30 seconds to achieve a balanced extraction of 20% while the Ethiopian may be 26 seconds to achieve the same extraction of around 20% (for arguments sake I am going to keep this simple and only use two coffees for this example, if it was a four bean blend like mentioned above the theory would be the same but with even more variables and inconsistencies). This means I need to under extract the Costa Rica to achieve a good result from the Ethiopian, over extract the Ethiopian to achieve the desired result from the Costa Rica or float somewhere between both not achieving a good result with either. In my opinion (and remember this really is just my opinion) none of these methods sound like something to aim for, personally I would prefer to drink them all as single origin coffee’s, enjoy them all for the unique flavours they exhibit and dial their extraction in properly so as to get the best from each coffee, otherwise it all just seems like a bit of a waste. It’s not to say you can’t get a tasty espresso from a blend, you most certainly can, it just widens the margin of error (there is already enough variables in trying to create quality consistent espresso without adding more) and makes it far harder to recreate. Then there is the fact that different coffees require different grind setting to produce a similar grind size (partially related to bean size and partially related to roast development) throwing another variable into the mix.
The more I asked myself the question of why are blends so popular, the more it really puzzled me that these are the default over single origins, it just didn’t make sense to me (I like to think I’m a fairly pragmatic person). So over the past couple weeks I did some reading on the topic, searching through other coffee blogs, roasters websites, coffee texts and videos (let me say there is those that agree with me, those that would think I’m ridiculous for drinking anything that isn’t a blend and those that are undecided). Some points as to why blends are so popular that I came across do make sense and it would be unfair for me not to put these points forward so you can make your own informed decision on the topic.
It allows roasters to serve something unique, setting them apart from other roasters.
A large amount of consumers don’t like the idea of change, they want the same tasting product year round. They know their flavour profile and are comfortable with that, blends allow you to keep the characteristics of your coffee relatively the same all year round.
Allows roasters to use up beans that may not be selling very well by themselves, creating a limited blend or seasonal blend that’s easy to market and sell, so they don’t have old green beans sitting round. (This does make sense to me, no one wants to see coffee go to waste).
It’s cost effective, some roasters will use cheaper lower quality beans as a filler to reduce the kg price of the coffee, mixing them with a couple of better beans to produce an acceptable cup of coffee at a cheaper price (I’m not the biggest fan of this, at the end of the day you get out what you put in).
Well that covers the ins and outs of blends and my opinions on the matter. I personally love single origins beans, I love the consistency once it’s dialled in, I love trying different flavours, learning about the characteristics of different origins, processing methods, and varieties of plants. Even if I was using blends, I personally would buy from different roasters all the time to try different flavours profiles. So maybe single origins just suit me better.
Full disclosure, when I owned my cafe, we developed a custom blend to suit our customer base and set ourselves apart from other cafes, so I have been on the other side of this fence too. If I was ever to open a cafe again (I very well may one day) I think this time around I would only serve single origins.
What do you think? Does this view make sense to you? Am I just being a bit picky? Do you like blends? Have you experienced inconsistencies when making coffee that may have been attributed to these issues with blends? I would like to know if I’m alone in this view or if people agree.
Whatever you are drinking, blend or single origin I hope you are enjoying it.
Lars xx
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