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what isSOE coffee?
SOE is the abbreviation of Single Origin Espresso, which means single origin espresso. The focus is to highlight the flavor of coffee from a certain origin. To put it bluntly, it means using single-origin coffee beans to make espresso.
In contrast, Italian coffee beans are blended. Front Street has repeatedly emphasized that coffee bean blends are a balance between taste, stability and price. That is, if you want to gain the advantages of taste and stability, the price will be high; while on the premise of price and stability, you have to sacrifice taste.
But SOE is different. First, let’s understand the background of its birth. SOE has only begun to rise in recent years. The application of single-origin coffee beans in hand brewing can show a variety of flavors with regional characteristics. In addition, with the diversity of information communication media in recent years, information such as the use of single-origin coffee beans to participate in competitions in the World Barista Competition has been widely disseminated. Using single-origin coffee beans in espresso is also a trend.
Is SOE coffee a specialty coffee?
In fact, this question is equivalent to whether single-origin coffee is specialty coffee? The answer is not entirely equal. When the concept of specialty coffee was first proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, yield was the primary goal. Coffee beans were collected and processed centrally in the production areas, and exported to the country to earn foreign exchange. Imagine that coffee beans of varying quality are mixed together. It is lucky that there is no obvious negative flavor.
At that time, Ms. Erna Knutsen proposed that specialty coffee is "coffee beans with the flavor of the production area cultivated under the unique microclimate and geographical conditions of the production area." The essential meaning is that good coffee should not be mixed into large quantities of commodity beans, but should be independent. Designed to differentiate from bulk commercial coffee in the New York futures trading market.
Therefore, specialty coffee beans are high-quality and good-tasting coffee beans that require good varieties, good environment, and intensive cultivation, while single-origin coffee beans only refer to coffee beans with the flavor of a single production area. There are no requirements on quality. For example, Indonesian Lindong Mandheling G2 is a single-origin coffee bean, but it is not necessarily a specialty coffee bean (specifically, it depends on the cupping score). Of course, the single-origin coffee we drink in coffee shops is almost 100% specialty coffee beans.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of SOE coffee?
Since its inception, SOE has labeled coffee with the good flavor of the production area, which means that the quality of the coffee beans selected must be guaranteed. How to highlight the advantages of SOE coffee is, of course, to highlight the flavor and make your eyes shine. This means that having good beans is not enough, you also need to roast them properly.
Like Italian blended beans, in order to meet the stability and lack of quality of coffee beans, the roasting degree will be deepened, so that the flavor will be stable. In order for SOE coffee to show an eye-catching flavor, it cannot be blended like beans, nor can it be made directly from lightly roasted single-origin coffee beans used for hand brewing. If the roasting is shallow, the extracted concentrate will be extremely sour. Therefore, SOE baking requires a unique curve.
Making delicious SOE is not just about choosing a good quality single-origin coffee bean. It requires countless roasting tests and extraction adjustments before you have a chance to achieve the desired effect (sometimes after several roastings and extractions, it is found that this bean is not suitable for making espresso). Espresso can amplify the flavor of a single-origin coffee bean, and it can also amplify the flaws of the coffee bean. For example, some coffee beans with good flavor will be lacking in taste. Therefore, in some stores that offer SOE, you can only find 1-2 types of SOE coffee beans.
Of course, a cup of latte or Americano made with SOE will have a flavor that cannot be matched by blended coffee. For example, Americano coffee made with Yirgacheffe SOE can clearly taste the tones of citrus, floral, and honey, especially the residual aroma in the cup after drinking. This is something that some bitter-based coffee blends cannot achieve.
Is SOE better than blended coffee beans?
There is a common imagination in the market that most blended beans are for the purpose of achieving price advantage and stable flavor, and the flavor will not be very good. SOE originally wants to distinguish this type of blended beans and show a memorable taste, so it will give priority to flavor, and of course the price will be higher.
But this common phenomenon does not prove that SOE is completely superior to blending. When I was developing the sunflower warm sun blend, I also thought about making sherry SOE coffee beans. When I tasted it, it showed that it was full of wine, but lacked sweetness and mouthfeel. So I wanted to increase the sweetness by adding Yirgacheffe red cherry plan. Finally, through different ratio tests, 60% of Shirley and 40% of Yirgacheffe were finally confirmed. This blend has a better flavor than Sherry SOE.
All in all, the emergence of SOE also means that the quality requirements of Italian coffee beans are getting higher and higher, which is beneficial to the development of Italian coffee on the whole.
What should we pay attention to when making SOE?
SOE single-origin espresso uses coffee beans that are generally not roasted too darkly in order to highlight the flavor of the production area. Compared with traditional darker roasted Italian coffee beans, the flavor will be more difficult to extract.
So on the one hand, it is necessary to adjust the extraction parameters to increase the extraction rate. For example, lengthen the extraction time, adjust the grinding degree, increase the amount of powder, etc.
On the other hand, when producing espresso with SOE as the base, the ratio of espresso to milk or water needs to be adjusted. Reduce the milk or water to highlight the flavor of the coffee so that the coffee is not too bland.
The beans chosen to make SOE also have very strict requirements. Although SOE has outstanding performance, since it comes from a single origin, its shortcomings are relatively easy to be magnified, so factors such as roasting and particle size will affect the flavor.
If you don’t have high-quality coffee beans, the SOE coffee will not taste good, and you can’t even hide it. Therefore, in the actual operation process, SOE coffee has very high technical requirements in all aspects, which is one of the reasons why SOE coffee is usually more expensive than normal Espresso.
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
