In the current Bar News an article about coffee from us has been published. It's about the topic of blending whiskey and other specialty products such as cigars, perfume and coffee.
Some excerpts below. And here the full article as pdf.
With coffee it's like with almost all other products in the gourmet and specialty sector. The purer the variety, the more exclusive, differentiated and better – that's the current creed of the specialty scene.
But at the beginning there is the blend. For very practical reasons already. Coffee is the dried kernel of a cherry-like fruit and grows on shrub-like trees. It is harvested once a year in most regions of the world. A picker walks from shrub to shrub and harvests the coffee. Many producers are smallholder farmers and different Arabica varieties grow on their farms. Typicas, Catuaís, Bourbons. When harvesting, the cherries land together in the basket and are mixed, washed, dried and bagged. 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 specialty products like wine and developed its own language of coffee sensory evaluation. Through the ability to describe and evaluate coffee in much more differentiated ways, a lively exchange has emerged between coffee producers on one side and roasters and baristas on the other. Producers began to deliberately separate individual varieties from each other and divide farms based on topography, sun exposure and shade density. The lots created this way were processed separately and analysis in the cup followed. Increasingly extraordinary flavor profiles emerged.
This exchange about coffee quality and flavor profiles triggered a revolution in the coffee sector. Roasters changed the way they roast. From then on, their goal was to showcase the special notes of single-variety coffees. For decades, there was a tendency to roast dark and roasty notes from caramelized sugars, chocolate and nuts were in the foreground. Subsequently, it became increasingly about showing the extraordinary notes in the cup. Fruity, citrusy and floral notes were the result. The roast became lighter to show 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 field. This is particularly because coffee is not yet a finished product like wine or whiskey after roasting. It is only then brewed. And different coffees have different solubility and usually also different sweet spots. Therefore, blending and brewing top-quality coffees is perhaps the most challenging thing in the coffee field at all.
