#5 Concerning Blends in Coffee

#5 Concerning Blends.

It’s good to be back, as some of you have commented I have indeed been slack these past three months. This was due to my competition commitments over the 2018 Australian Barista Competition finals. As I write Australia’s new champion prepares for his debut at the world stage in Boston, go Matt Lewin, Team ONA and team Australia!

This year I have come away with the knowledge that competing within both Cup Tasters and the Barista competition was no mean feat. My time was rationed between commitments to both competitions and it left me with having not enough time to do either of these competitions justice. Nethertheless, I come back from competitions armed with more hard lessons learned, and learned well.

This blog will deal principally with not only creating different blends, but also repeating flavour profiles across a rotating line-up of seasonal coffees. This seems to be overlooked by many roasters when they cast their eyes upon the task of creating an iconic blend, repeatability is as relevant as what coffees you put in your blend. Consider an established coffee company ‘hypothetically’ that has been operating for 6 years. Say, after 2 head roasters, a host of seasons and possibly changing gear/management expectations few blends can definitively claim to still achieve the original premise and frankly few blends have a customer base ferocious enough to demand it.

For me when I think back to iconic blends I always end up fondly reminiscing on ST ALI Orthodox. I know I’m biased I pumped that lil ripper day in day out for 2 years. However Orthodox does teach us an important lesson. It was super consistent. Its flavour profile to my mind was salted caramel; it was always this slightly bity caramel flavour that in a 150ml cup was as close to a delicious confectionary as a coffee can ever hope to be. How did they achieve these constant caramel notes across so many seasons of coffees? I will never know but here’s a few of my thoughts on blending for flavour and creating for repeatability.

When creating a blend it needs to have a core ‘flavour profile,’ I’m not talking about three tasting notes commonly displayed on the bags though. I’m talking about an end flavour the blend is aiming to hit each time.

But here’s the thing, the coffees are seasonal. Even if you bought a years’ worth of the components, the green coffee changes with age so you cannot guarantee the blend even then! Even buying fresh coffee from the exact same farm the coffee can change its flavour from harvest to harvest. Tricky!

To confound things further you are aiming for a definitive profile that is iconic to your brand. It can take years to nail a single season of blend that is awesome.

Consider this, the basis for the sensory kit, the foundation of all palette training. It is the belief that certain combinations of chemical compounds, in certain quantities will bring to mind a scent recollection of a certain taste. For example; Banana in the Scenttone* Aroma kit is made up of - Allyl Hexantone, Linalool, Vanillin, Fusel Oil and Eugenol. These compounds in the right quantities when smelt remind us of the aroma of banana. I don’t what these compounds smell like isolated, but together they are reminding our olfactory memory strongly of banana.

What I’m saying is when we create a blend; we do not need to be conscious of every tasting note of every coffee coming out, it’s not like a single origin were our purpose it to reflect he farms terrior fairly. We need coffees that are a pleasant combination and give us a recollection of our ‘end flavour goal’ be it Turkish delight, Caramel or Raspberry Candy.

When we replace coffees in a blend as part of its seasonal substitution, we do not need coffees that are note for note like the last coffee. We need coffees that fulfil the specific role that the departing coffee achieved in the blend previously.

Understand? Na me neither, let’s check an example out:

So let’s say you are aiming for a milk coffee that’s like an old school European Apple Pastry. Let’s analyse the pastry experience; a sugary uptake coupled with a buttery body, a medium weight, perhaps a doughy mouthfeel. Spices like cinnamon would be fine in the centre palette and a crisp hard edge wouldn’t hurt, because after all a pastry doesn’t have any linger. On top of these all the fruit notes within this coffee need to be hitting ‘stewed fruits’. When I think of stewed fruits, I think higher caramelization of sugars and less freshness but with greater mouthfeel. Bear in mind even though we need apple pastry, finding a coffee with tasting notes of apple won’t necessarily achieve this. For more on how easily identifiable flavours are achieved through association not repetition, see my previous blog: Developing Drinks.Bramble.

So these are some premises for our blend, now we need to find way of getting these into the cup with suitable coffees. Let’s break it down a little more with some hypothetical coffees. These are real coffees culled from a recent Café Imports list, so they are available in the same season. For the purposes of this exercise let’s assume the coffees reflect the tasting notes in the spot list accurately. Hopefully you all have green bean suppliers that you trust to have good and fair assessment of their own spot lists.

Costa Rica, Finca Tono, natural. Blueberry and stone fruit with caramel and vanilla.

Natural, this will go through milk great! I’m not as much interested in the blueberry on its own but how these two fruits can blend with a little super sugar centric roasting to become a ‘generic stewed fruit’. Toffee is ignored it’s not going to get in the way, but I’ll aim to dull down and blend into the other coffees to work for us in that ‘buttery’ taste and feel that we are seeking. Caramel is a high sweetness; it will work nicely sitting right in the middle of the coffee and making lots of easy, responsive sweetness for the other coffees.

Guatamala, Finca Anonal, HueHuetenago. Washed. Stewed apple and red grape with caramel. Balanced and sweet with a creamy finish.

This fits nicely into our premise, again trying to hit our stewed fruit with a little nudge into the apple pastry. Creamy mouthfeel will further reiterate our pastry. Also again repeating flavours of caramel helps move the whole blend along. But take a note of that red grape, it’s not important, here is the point I’m trying to make. Purchase for the coffees similarity towards the majority of your brainstorming points around the ‘key flavour goals’ of the blend as a whole. Do not be afraid of outlier flavours that come up in selection, no coffee will be perfect and we can easily find ways of roasting that downplay a few loose end flavours within components.

We continue in this way filling out the blend by selecting coffees that have a flavour that is immediately relatable to our end flavour goal. I have had a lot of luck by finding coffees who’s primary overarching flavour is a tone I was seeking for the blend, while their secondary flavour is also at least of some importance to the end flavour. Or, at least not in direct opposition to it. For example; even though caramel didn’t come up as an instant reminder of apple pastry in our initial brainstorm, we did arrive at intense developed sugars being a big part of pastry tastings. Guatamala Finca Anonal (caramel/stewed apple) can be roasted to accentuate stewed apple and then the caramel can be toned down from a vivid recollection of caramel, into a more general developed sugar. Conversely, on the subject of difficult opposing flavours that will work against you a coffee with high citrus as its main note and then a linger of generic stewed fruit will not suit our purposes. A general stewed fruit is not strong enough to fully suggest pastry with a higher and more primary note of orange.  

Below is a graph of the proposed blend, we can see on the right the aspects of the initial brainstorm summarizing the key components of Apple Pastry. On the right we see the different aspects to the blends construction that addressed these areas. Weight of the pastry and crispness were sorted out via recipe choice. This touches back to my notes in the blog developing drinks and how a roaster that has a recommended grinder/machine list can aggressively correlate a coffees flavour profile, though selection and recipe choice.

Aspects of the Apple Pastry profile.

Our desired goal. Ways to achieve goals.

Buttery - Coffee choice

Sugars - Coffee choice

Medium weight - Espresso recipe/dose.Roast degree

Spices/cinnamon etc Coffee choice

Crispness to drink- Espresso recipe

Stewed fruit - Coffee Choice

Obviously I have omitted a lot of knowledge about bringing certain aspects of individual coffees out via roast profiles, finding the right roast for a coffee is crucial. But worthy of a blog of its own, for now ill say this:

I am in this respect a big fan of post blending my blends because this allows a roaster to hit his or her numbers on each coffee accurately. To my mind a pre blended coffee simply cannot achieve anywhere near the specific accuracy a blend component needs if they desire to create blends in the way suggested in this post.

My last consideration needs to go to balance, I have assumed a flavor profile of apple pastry purely to show how a blend can be fleshed out working back from a flavour profile. But all coffees and especially blends created for milk drinks need to exhibit harmonious balance between acidity, sweetness and bitterness.

I have always held the belief a milk coffee needs to show a preference towards bitterness, body and perhaps acidity because as the milks fat heats it will caramelize and add a considerable amount of sweetness to the finished drink. If you have the fortune to create a blend from scratch finding ‘end flavor goals’ that are in themselves already balanced (Apple pastry, chocolate, buttery biscuit) will always make balance easy to achieve in the end result.

Hoping this blog expands your creativity and allows you a vantage point in drink creation that makes your blending more unique.

Remember it is the repeat-ability of a great flavors that makes a blend a customer favorite and the uniqueness of that end profile that makes it stand out.  

Keep brewing.

*I personally use and own a Scentone aroma kit, I have no invested interest in any particular kit and am not plugging Scentone aroma kit specifically.