Do industrial coffee blends just leave you wanting something better? Is your morning cup of Joe just not what it used to be? Maybe it’s time to give your hand at homemade coffee blends! The results can be truly amazing. To help you create a perfect blend, that’s just right for you, here are 3 great homemade coffee blends.
Tip #1 – Avoid Industrial Coffee Beans
By industrial, I mean any coffee company that roasts coffee by the ton instead of by the pound. If the company is on NYSE, you can bet your bottom dollar that they sell cheap, burnt, and bitter coffee. I’m talking bout companies like Folgers, Yuban, Maxwell House, Kirkland, BRCC, and especially Starbucks. Why is their coffee so bad?
- They never taste test the coffee beans that they buy.
- Next, they burn the snot out of their beans.
- A vast majority of coffee sold in the US has been sitting in warehouses and on store shelves for months if not years. No wonder their coffee sucks.
Tip #2 – Avoid Beans From Different Regionals
The advertising objective of a blend is to bring out the best that each bean has to offer. For instance, if you have a bean with strong chocolate notes and you blend it with a bean that has strong raspberry notes, what you’re hoping to sell is a blend that tastes like chocolate-raspberry.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. When industrial coffee companies blend different kinds of beans, instead of bringing out the best those beans have to offer, nearly 100% of the time, the blender brings out the worst aspects from these different beans. In reality, the true objective of blends is to make money from blending cheap beans.
Tip #3 – Blend Roasts of the Same Bean
Only blend single source beans. By single source beans, I mean beans that were picked from the same country, from the same county, from the same fields, and picked on the same day. A true coffee blend is a blend of different roasts of the exact same bean.
Like wine grapes, the flavor of coffee is very sensitive to slight variations in light, humidity, rainfall, elevation, wind, etc. Therefore, beans in one field may produce a specific quality and flavor, where beans on the next hill over will likely produce a different quality and flavor. This sensitivity is so specific, that even beans from the same field, but picked on different days, can produce dramatically different flavors. This is why we purchase 100% of a year’s production which comes from a specific field and picked on a specific day.
3 Blending Rules
1 – Buy The Best Beans
Coffee beans, like most things come in different qualities. For coffee beans, at the bottom of the totem-pole are Robusta beans, which are widely used by nearly every industrial coffee company. They’re bitter and nasty.
At the top of that pole are Arabica beans. But even within this spectrum of Arabica beans, there are blends of Arabica and Robusta, there are also bad cheap Arabica beans, mediocre Arabica beans, and awesome Arabica beans. The difference in flavor between great beans and mediocre beans is nothing short of amazing. I know for a fact that single source beans almost always taste better than a blend that includes poor-quality beans.
2. Pick Your Favorite Roast
What roast is best? Well, that depends on you. What do you like?
a) Industrial Burnt Roast – Do you want your coffee to taste like you licked the inside of a burning barrel? If so, then run down to your local grocery store or coffee shop and buy French Roast, Italian Roast, Continental Roast, City Roast, Espresso Roast, etc., which are just different names for burnt.
b) Our Barely Dark Roast – Here at Lake City Coffee Roasters, we also sell a “Dark Roast”, but our dark roast is barely The outside of the bean is a very dark brown, but never black. Leaving the precious oils inside of the bean. It’s those oils that you really want. Those oils contain the coffee’s bioflavonoids, antioxidants, caffeine, flavor, and aroma.
c) Medium Roast – Our medium roast is a medium brown. This leaves a lot of oils inside the bean. Thus, you’ll get more true “coffee” flavor, but you’ll also taste a balanced variety of prominent and subtle notes of chocolate, citrus, nut, bark, spices, or floral.
d) White Roast – White roasted beans are simply a very light roasted bean. Typically, white roast is yellow in color. Yellow colored coffee tastes like straw, which I personally don’t like. So, instead of yellow, I roast our white coffee one shade darker to a golden color. This extra minute of roasting imparts an amazing, but very slight, peanut butter after taste. Don’t knock it until you try it. We sell a lot of this stuff. Our White Roast is especially good in blends.
3 – Keep it Fresh
The fresher the roast, the better the coffee. So, always purchase fresh roasted beans. By fresh, I’m talking about beans that were roasted less than a week ago. If there’s no roast date on the bag, move on! Without a roast date, it’s probably months if not years old.
How do you keep your beans fresh for more than a few weeks? Oxygen is the enemy of freshness. Once you open the coffee’s air-tight bag, then make sure that you put the remaining coffee into an air-tight container, where it should remain fresh for a week or two. A Mason jar works real well.
Homemade Coffee Blends
The following blends came from our customers. If it wasn’t for their creativity, I would never have thought of these blends. The key here is to experiment to find what you like. So, feel free to mix up the percentages.
Dark with Medium
Many of our customers, especially our espresso fans will blend our dark and medium roasts. The most common ratios are 50/50.
Dark or Medium with White
Yeah, this is a weird one. White coffee is just a super light roast. Typically white coffee is actually yellow in color. I think yellow roasted beans taste like straw. So, I take the roast just one shade darker to a “golden” color. What that does is make the coffee have a slight “peanut butter” taste. Many of our customers mix 80% Dark or Medium with 20% White. It gives a very slight peanut butter after taste, which is quite nice.
Dark or Medium with Decaf
The most common ratio is 50/50.
A Note on Espresso
Espresso is a brewing method. It is not a bean. It is not a roast. And it sure as heck isn’t a blend. Use whatever bean, roast, or blend that you personally like in your espresso machine.
For example, I used to never drink espresso. I didn’t like it. Then one day I was at a friend’s house and he offered me an espresso. I was about to turn him down, when I remembered that he was also a customer of mine and I remembered that he mixed our dark roast with our medium roast 50/50. I said sure.
Man was I surprised. Espresso is usually very bitter, which I detest. But not this. Because he was using our beans, which are specifically chosen and roasted to be super smooth, that espresso was pure delight.
Lake City Coffee Roasters
Here at Lake City Coffee Roasters, Alisha and I (Russell) have come to appreciate the unique smoothness and robust flavor of beans from the Tarrazu Region of Costa Rica. These beans are so good, that they’ll give even Kona coffee a run for their money, but at a fraction of the cost.
To that end, each year we taste test several dozen different coffee beans from this region. At the end of one long grueling week of taste testing, we select the smoothest and best tasting bean and then we source 100% of our beans from this single grower. Then early each Tuesday morning, we consolidate our orders for the week, roast our beans to perfection, package them, and ship hem on the same day.
Sincerely,
Russell & Alisha Volz