What Is The Best Coffee Blend

September 20, 2017|Russell Volz|Beans And Roasting

Coffee blends are all the rage. So, which is the best coffee blend? It seems like there’s a different kind of blend for each season, holiday, day of the week, and every palate.

Best Coffee Blend

Espresso Blend
Market Place Blend
Christmas Blend
House Bend
Gourmet Blend
Mountain Blend
Arabica Blend
etc.

So, which is the best coffee blend? Truthfully? None of them are the best coffee blend. Industrial coffee companies create whole bean coffee blends to save them money and to fool us into thinking that we’re getting something special, which we’re not. Coffee blends are in reality marketing speak for, “We bought the cheapest damn beans that we could find and ‘blended’ them together.”

Arabica vs. Robusta

There are only two types of coffee plants in the world, Arabica and Robusta. Arabica is smooth, flavorful, complex, difficult to grow, and expensive. Robusta on the other hand is bitter, nasty, grows like a weed, and is dirt-cheap.

Nearly ALL industrial coffee companies and many small independent local coffee roasters, even my home-town Spokane Coffee Roasters, create coffee blends for two reasons; first to reduce their costs by using inferior Robusta beans; and secondly as marketing hype to sound more exotic.

Taste Test

Well, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. If you do a side-by-side blind taste test, most people prefer single source coffee (all the beans are from a single farmer/co-op) vs. blends. Why? With a single source coffee you get one or two pure flavors. Additionally, the quality of the beans and thus the brewed coffee is almost guaranteed.

Costa Rican Coffee

That is why we source only the very best organic Costa Rican coffee that money can buy. And we source it from only one country (Costa Rica) and one region (Tarrazu). So I guess you could say that we only sell one bean and three roasts;