The Craft of Blends
Why We Love Coffee Blends as much as Single Origins and How We Craft Them
At its most basic level, a coffee blend combines beans from different countries or regions around the world to achieve a unique expression of flavor, acidity, and body while a single origin comes from one specific farm or cooperative. Some blends are born out of experimentation while others are the fulfillment of a desired profile. When done right, they create a harmony that single-origin coffees cannot often mimic.
Why We Create Blends at Blue Bottle
It's not uncommon that a guest will come into the cafe, look at the menu, and then ask a barista if they can "just have a cup of coffee." In these moments, we look to our coffee blends to provide comfort, relief, and pleasure. We want to give our guests the most delicious version of their platonic coffee ideal. If we're lucky, we get to start a conversation and find out more about what each guest likes and how to help them find it.
Which is Better? Blends or Single Origins?
In the modern specialty coffee world, there are those who believe coffee is only harmed by human intervention and it’s up to us as professionals to bring out its inherent qualities. For some, this means all coffee should always be roasted more gently to maintain as much of its fruit quality as possible and it should be served only as a single origin, no matter how wild or unbalanced it might taste. If coffee were entertainment, proponents of single origins believe coffee should be theater—a once-in-a-lifetime show experienced during a certain time and place. This experience can be profound, of course.
Blends, however, are more like movies. They are created with fewer restraints and can be called up again and again to enjoy as often as you like.
The question of whether to drink blends or single origins is entirely a matter of personal taste.
As our founder James Freeman once said, “Some customers are searching for novelty, excitement, and surprise, while others yearn for routine, perfectly suited to their preferences. Fortunately, we can satisfy both tastes—our guests needn't choose.”
In truth, we love our coffee blends as much as our single origins and believe each has its time and place. Single origins, for example, are exciting for their transparency—giving us a sensory connection to specific regions and people. Our blends, on the other hand, are almost always made with organic coffee and provide us with a consistent and delicious cup every day.
If you’re like us, and you have an affinity for both, here’s a suggestion that might delight you: Enjoy the comfort of a blend in the morning (maybe with a touch of warm milk) and try a vivacious single origin in the afternoon. To allow you to taste a few blends side by side, we’ve bundled three together in our wildly popular Blend Box.
“The notion of which is more desirable—a blend or a single origin—has seesawed throughout the history of coffee. Right now, the single origins have it… but sometimes people just want something simple, consistent, and delicious. That’s what a good blend can do.”
HOW WE CREATE COFFEE BLENDS AT BLUE BOTTLE
Contrary to popular belief, there’s no one “coffee” taste. All coffee is made of the seed of a tropical fruit, roasted to unlock the flavors within—whether fruit-forward Ethiopian coffees, tart Kenyan coffees, chocolaty Brazilian coffees, or densely rich Central American ones, to name a few. At Blue Bottle, we celebrate the range.
One of the rewards of creating a coffee blend is we can have a coffee that's truly unique to us. It offers some comforting predictability to our menu and familiarity for our guests. Our three mainstay blends are Giant Steps, Bella Donovan, and Three Africas. Most of our espressos are blends, too.
Many of our blends fall into a flavor profile we call “Bold and Comforting.” These coffees, including Giant Steps and Hayes Valley Espresso, are often more darkly roasted than single origins to highlight their chocolaty notes and brown sugar sweetness. They lean on washed-processed coffees from Central and Latin America, which are roasted dark enough to develop nutty and cocoa-heavy notes that sing with brown sugar sweetness.
But we also have fun using unexpected coffees in our blends to influence the flavor and texture of a coffee. For example, we especially love using natural-process Ethiopias in our blends. It contributes a syrupy quality to the Bella Donovan as well as the Three Africas.
Making a coffee blend consistent throughout the year is much harder than it sounds. It's like a puzzle, in which the pieces are always changing, but the overall effect is the same. Our component coffees are generally organic and we work with high-quality exporters throughout the coffee-growing world to help us source the coffee based on certain characteristics. Because coffee ripens at different times of the year, components may change with the season to optimize freshness. Our Quality Control team tests every batch from the roastery to ensure that a blend tastes as it should, remaining constant despite shifting parts.
HISTORY OF COFFEE BLENDS
Coffee started as a commercial crop and was "single origin" by default. By the sixteenth century, cafes across the Middle East served coffee from Yemen. As coffee cultivation spread, it became economical to make more predictable, sizable, and distinct blends.
Conventional wisdom tells us that the very first of these was Mocha-Java, in which a bright coffee from Yemen (shipped from the Red Sea port of Al-Makha, or Mocha) was added to the heavy, chocolaty coffees being shipped out of Java by Dutch colonizers.
The earliest European coffeehouses relied on blends to win over fans. Despite critics fearful of “the drink of democracy”—and monarchs commanding their subjects to avoid coffee—its allure was unstoppable.
As coffee companies became larger, pre-ground coffees came into vogue and the result was an overall decline in quality. By the twentieth century, everyday drinkers had resigned themselves to cans of pre-ground coffee, which smelled great the first time they were opened (often thanks to sprayed on “coffee” fragrance), but were mediocre at best. One exception was Italian espresso.
Though it was invented in the 1880s, espresso became indispensable after World War II, when quality green coffee was scarce. Roasters would add lower-quality Robusta coffee beans from Africa to slightly better coffees from Brazil. The high-pressure extraction would yield a concentrated coffee that gave the perception of acidity while masking any “off” flavors of the inferior coffee blend. While espresso made with a high-quality blend is all the better for it, the brewing method has proven its ability to transform poor coffee into something that tastes pretty good.
Decades later across the Atlantic, Peet's emerged as a coffee innovator. In the 1960s, their signature blends, which used well-sourced coffee acidic enough to withstand dark roasting, were nothing short of revelatory.
HOW TO BREW COFFEE BLENDS VS. SINGLE ORIGINS
When trying to learn more about what type of coffee you like, we often recommend brewing using the pour over method. It relies on just a few simple tools and lets the coffee shine.
In general, blends take a tighter water-to-coffee ratio than single origins. In coffee insider speak, this means that the total dissolved solubles (TDS)—the amount of coffee dissolved in the water—is greater. So the perception that a blend coffee is “bigger” or “heavier” is actually true—there’s more of it in each sip. When brewing pour over, we generally recommend using 28 to 30 g of a coffee blend to 350 g of water, though for some of our seasonal blends that are roasted lighter, we might suggest a smaller dose, about 25 g. For single origins, we usually recommend between 22 g and 24 g of coffee per 350 g water.
Whether to add milk or cream, the choice is up to you. While milk might distract from the delicate nuance of a single origin, our coffee blends are made for such decadence.
