Everything You Should Know About Coffee Blends

As coffee geeks, the most common terms you would come across are coffee blends and single-origin coffees.

Almost all the coffees available, may it be the giant espresso bars or simple coffee on retail shelves are blended in one way or another. Therefore, understanding the term coffee blend and its micro technicalities is important to know what is in the cup of coffee you have every morning or whenever an energy boost is required.

This article aims to clarify the term coffee blend, its sources, the reasons behind creating a coffee blend, and the difference between a coffee blend and single-origin coffees.

Also Read: Top 3 Health Benefits Of Drinking Coffee

What Is A Coffee Blend?

A coffee blend is the mixing of coffee beans from different origins or places. Here the ‘different places’ are not only different countries. These differences can be the micro-level difference in the same producing farm. The slight difference in altitudes or conditions in the same farm, or different regions of the same country, or different areas of the same farming region.

Only by understanding the term in different places can you deduce the wideness in the nature of coffee blends. They come in various forms, sizes, and shapes. The term coffee blend encompasses all the commercial and small level blends.

Why Are Coffees Blended?

Coffees are blended for a multitude of reasons, often targeted towards producing a complex flavor that can not be produced using a single varietal. Each coffee has specific intrinsic flavors and producers have only those to play with. These blends often enable the production of perfectly balanced flavors to enhance your coffee experience.

While on the commercial scale blending may be a business strategy. It can be done to achieve a special price bracket easily. Blends may even enable the production companies to achieve the target quantity easily and meet specific production requirements as well.

Blending the coffees from various places can produce multiple flavors due to the mixing of various specific intrinsic flavors in coffees of each place.

Coffee Blends For Espresso

Expresso is a simple yet highly complex beverage, to begin with, these are strong beans often diluted by some liquid water or milk products. While blending the beans from various origins to create a flavorful expresso you need to make sure it tastes good both in black form or a milk-based beverage.

Many big brands come up with various flavors specific to them by blending coffees from various places. Good blends for espresso taste exceptional both in black and milk form.

If you are a pure coffee aficionado then you can tell the difference in components of the blend by tasting it. These are blends that make you think why the coffee is of the same flavor but different in taste than the last time.

Various coffee blends can be made from Columbian coffees as it has 8 different climate regions. The perfect blends can make a versatile flavor that works well for the home user, someone making it on a stovetop, and even for a barista.

Coffee Blends Vs Single-Origin Coffee

The two terms are self-explanatory but still the interpretation of origin and place matters in both.

Often the same origin is interpreted as a coffee from the same country. Usually, if all the components of a coffee come from the same country it is referred to as a single origin coffee.

These coffees are often celebrated as the purest of the flavors available. This interpretation ignores the differences in flavors for the regions in a single country. As one country may have various climatic variances from region to region. So, for a coffee to be a single origin it needs to be specific so no sub-flavors are mixed.

Getting a single-origin coffee from Brazil requires it to be of very specific origin as the country has various climatic and altitude variations.

How To Create A Coffee Blend

Creating a coffee blend depends on your ability to differentiate the flavors of various coffee from different origins. This requires your skill to grade and identify what flavors a certain type of coffee will add to the blend. This skill is not easy to attain. Professionally, it requires training and Q-grading qualifications. Well, for some coffee aficionados this skill is gained by experience.