Until now, most coffee shops still focus on Italian blends. The reason why blended beans have become the mainstream in the market is that it can not only reduce the cost of raw materials, but also provide stable extraction for daily production, and try to ensure the taste of drinks based on espresso. To put it simply, the coffee shop chooses blending to achieve stable and consistent production standards.
What is an Italian coffee blend?
When Italian coffee first became popular, coffee shops around the world used single-origin beans, such as mocha coffee and Brazilian coffee. Since it is a matter of course, no one will emphasize or explain it too much. As the consumer demand for coffee continues to increase, coffee beans from major producing areas are prone to unevenness, and the yield, quality or flavor may become unstable. In order to avoid risks caused by these factors in extraction, some businesses have begun to combine coffee beans from different origins to make them complement each other.
At the same time, manufacturers will also use dark roasting to eliminate unpleasant flavors and acidity. In this way, even if the batch quality of individual origins is lower, its defects can be covered up by dark roasting, and the extracted coffee oil will be richer. Therefore, before the advent of the specialty coffee wave, the raw materials used to make espresso were generally a combination of coffee beans from two or more origins, without paying too much attention to the origin and batch of coffee. As for the taste, it is basically fixed on bitter flavors such as caramel, dark chocolate, nuts, cream, and cocoa.
Front Street hopes that everyone who comes to Front Street Coffee can drink stable and distinctive espresso or milk coffee every time, so the espresso is made from a blend of Front Street Ethiopian red cherries and Front Street Honduran whiskey barrel sherry beans for espresso.
FrontStreet CoffeeThe purpose of blending coffee beans：
1. Create long-term stable flavor
Different production seasons in the same production area or even different batches within a year will also produce different flavors. The shortcomings of a single origin are exposed here. You cannot be confident that you will be able to drink coffee from a single origin next year that tasted good this year (except for coffee beans that are processed in a way that dominates the coffee flavor, and other factors between the origin and the cafe will also cause the coffee beans you buy to taste different from the past). So one of the purposes of blending is to create a product that can be supplied for a long time and has a long-term flavor stability. When the quality of one of the coffee beans cannot meet the requirements or changes in the new production season, you can find similar coffee beans to replace them to achieve the purpose of stability.
2. Create flavors that cannot be produced by a single coffee bean
Sometimes coffee beans from a single origin are like a person, with both strengths and weaknesses, and blending is like organizing a team to use their strengths to make up for each other's weaknesses, so as to achieve the effect of complementing each other. It's like using a coffee bean with a higher sweetness and a coffee bean with a higher acidity to achieve a sweet-sour balance, or adding a certain amount of Brazilian beans to the coffee beans to improve the overall body. These are the purposes of blending.
3. Front Street will then determine the flavor of the blending target.
When FrontStreet Coffee was blending Front Street Nuanyang Italian Blend coffee beans, we were very clear about blending beans with a wine aroma, so we could immediately include Front Street Honduran Sherry Barrels, Front Street Honduran Lychee Orchid, and Front Street Colombia San Jose coffee beans that are fermented in wine barrels and have obvious wine aromas on the blending candidate list. After many attempts, as well as factors such as cost-effectiveness, we finally settled on Front Street Honduran sherry barrels as the main tone of Front Street Sunflower Warm Sun blended coffee beans.
4. Finally, Front Street will determine the blending type.
The advantage of raw spelling is that the same roasting level can be used to make the coffee stable and uniform. The second is that it can reduce the number of roasting times, and it can be roasted in one time, which improves efficiency. At the same time, the shortcomings of raw blending are also very obvious. The limitations of raw blending are very large. Generally, raw blending recommends several beans with a relatively close density of coffee beans. For example, if a coffee bean suitable for light roasting and a coffee bean suitable for dark roasting are mixed together to roast the same roasting degree, the situation of 1+1<1 will easily occur.
The advantage of cooked roasting is that each bean can be roasted according to its optimal roasting degree, maximizing the characteristics of each bean. However, the disadvantage of cooked coffee beans is that daily quality control and management will be more difficult. Inconsistent roasting dates require more attention to the bean-raising period. Imagine using 4 to 5 coffee beans to make cooked coffee beans. This product requires attention to 4 to 5 roasting dates. FrontStreet Coffee adopts a cooked blending method when roasting Front Street Warm Sun Blend, roasting Front Street Honduras Sherry Barrel coffee beans and Front Street Sun-dried Yirgacheffe red cherry plan separately to maximize the wine aroma of Front Street Sherry Barrel coffee beans and retain as much as possible the fruity acidity and citrus berry aroma of the other Front Street Sun-dried Yirgacheffe.
When FrontStreet Coffee selects blending beans and formulates the blending formula, it first needs to determine the characteristics of the coffee it wants to present, including the expression of sourness, sweetness and bitterness, expectations for the body, coffee flavor, and whether the main product is milk coffee or American style, or espresso. These are all factors that need to be considered when selecting green beans, determining the roasting method, and determining the formula. Not only that, the formula will be tested, adjusted, retested, and adjusted again many times before it is finalized...
For beginners who don’t have much experience in making coffee, if they want to make a delicious latte, it is obviously more advantageous to use Italian blended beans. Speaking from experience in extraction, Front Street recommends choosing Italian blended coffee beans with higher stability. Blended products usually combine flavors from different production areas, and are roasted to medium or above, which makes it easier to extract rich oils (coffee beans with high oils are more suitable for making milk coffee). In this way, the concentrated taste we make is thick and rich, and the fault tolerance rate is higher. Moreover, most Italian-style blended beans are mainly produced in stores. Compared with single-origin beans with the same type of flavor, the price is relatively low, focusing on an economical and cost-effective route.
Coffee Beans: Front Street Sunflower·Warm Sun Blend
Amount of coffee powder: 20g
Coffee liquid volume: 40g
Powder to liquid ratio: 1:2
Extraction time: 26~32 seconds
Grinding scale: Galileo 2.0 grid
The coffee machine used by Front Street has a double powder bowl capacity, which requires 20 grams of coffee powder each time. The extracted powder-to-liquid ratio is 1:2, which means 40 grams of coffee liquid can be produced in a reasonable time. The extraction time is related to the flow rate of the coffee powder. Generally, the single extraction time will be controlled between 20 and 35 seconds. If it is less than 20 seconds, the coffee will easily taste thin and bland, and if it exceeds 35 seconds, it will easily over-extract and cause the coffee to have a burnt and bitter taste. Therefore, Front Street will control the espresso time within the range of 26 to 32 seconds.
Before extraction, we need to dry the powder bowl first, turn on the grinder, grind out a double portion of coffee powder, place it on an electronic scale and measure the increase or decrease until it weighs 20 grams. Then use a powder spreader to spread the coffee powder, and use the tamper to press vertically downward to fill the coffee powder cake tightly to ensure more stable coffee extraction.
Then turn on the extraction switch and let in water for 1 to 2 seconds to moisten the brewing head and take away the coffee grounds stuck on it. Place an electronic scale under the cup where the Espresso is connected, return the weight to 0, and place it under the brewing head during extraction.
Gently snap the handle onto the brewing head and start turning down the extraction switch. Observe the changes in the extraction liquid. When the electronic scale shows that 40 grams of coffee liquid has been extracted, and the time is about 30 seconds, pull down the extraction switch. The brewing parameters will change subtly based on the daily air humidity and the state of the coffee beans, so the amount of coffee powder, scale, and extraction amount of coffee liquid need to be adjusted up or down.
You can now buy the above coffee beans online at the Taobao store “FrontStreet Coffee” (前街咖啡). FrontStreet Coffee is a long-established specialty coffee roaster in Guangzhou, China, and its Guangzhou retail shop sells coffee beans only. The shop carries dozens of coffee beans from different origins around the world, including carefully selected single-origin beans for V60 pour-over and espresso. Guangzhou’s FrontStreet Coffee shop is recommended by many coffee lovers.
The FrontStreet 2013 Yunnan coffee beans sold in the store come from the Typica variety grown at FrontStreet Coffee’s own plantation in Yunnan. The name comes from the year the brand and the plantation were founded. You can buy these beans from China’s Yunnan origin at the Guangzhou shop and at FrontStreet’s Taobao store.
FrontStreet coffee beans are freshly roasted within 5 days and deliver consistently excellent quality and great value. Orders placed before 17:00 are shipped the same day, and most areas within Guangdong Province receive them the next day.
FrontStreet Coffee Taobao store: https://qianjiecoffee.taobao.com
Or search for “前街咖啡” (FrontStreet Coffee) on Taobao
Important Notice: FrontStreet Coffee has moved to a new address: 315, Donghua East Road, Guangzhou (coffee beans only)
Tel: 020 38364473
