An article about coffee by us has been published in the current Bar News. It's about the topic of blending whiskey and other specialty products like cigars, perfume, and of course, coffee.
Some excerpts are below. And here is the full article as a PDF.
With coffee, it's like with almost all other products in the gourmet and specialty sector. The more single-origin, the more exclusive, differentiated, and better – that's the current credo of the specialty scene.
But at the beginning, there's the blend. For very practical reasons. Coffee is the dried seed of a cherry-like fruit and grows on shrub-like trees. In most regions of the world, it's harvested once a year. A picker walks from shrub to shrub and harvests the coffee. Many producers are small farmers, and different Arabica varieties grow on their farms: Typicas, Catuais, Bourbons. During harvesting, the cherries land together in the basket and are washed, dried, and bagged together. The farm blend is created.
Coffee Quality Offensive
Over the last 20 years, a quality revolution has taken place in coffee. Coffee has learned from other complex indulgence products like wine and developed its own language of coffee sensory analysis. The ability to describe and evaluate coffee in a much more differentiated way has led to a lively exchange between coffee producers on one side and roasters and baristas on the other. Producers began to deliberately separate individual varieties and categorize farms based on topography, sun exposure, and shade density. The resulting lots were processed separately, followed by analysis in the cup. Increasingly extraordinary flavor profiles emerged.
This exchange about coffee quality and flavor profiles triggered a revolution in the coffee sector. Roasters changed the way of roasting. Their goal from then on was to showcase the special notes of single-origin coffees. For decades, roasting tended to be dark, and roasted notes of caramelized sugars, chocolate, and nuts were prominent. Subsequently, the focus shifted more and more to showcasing the extraordinary notes in the cup. Fruity, citrus, and floral notes were the result. Roasting became lighter to reveal more of the "terroir" in the cup. Café bars and baristas picked up on this and marketed these coffees as Single Origins, Micro- and Nano-Lots.
New Developments in Coffee Blending
The latest attempts aim to make the best coffees even better through blending. However, there are many challenges in the coffee sector here. This is particularly due to the fact that coffee after roasting is not yet a finished product like wine or whiskey. It still needs to be brewed. And different coffees have different solubilities and usually different sweet spots. Therefore, blending and brewing top coffees is perhaps the most challenging aspect of coffee altogether.
