Appearing in Bean Scene Magazine, Issue 10, 2005
In the end, it’s all in the blend
There are many parallels between the coffee industry and the wine industry. Although they share growing and harvesting techniques, their main similarity is in the blending that is done to produce a complex-tasting finished product. Matthew Gee and David Gee look at why, how and when coffee is blended. A case study of the blend of a chain of Australian cafés is also analysed.
Why Coffee is Blended
Very few single origin coffee beans (beans coming from one place, for example Brazil, Kenya or Papua New Guinea) on their own offer what most consumers would perceive as a palatable coffee. Most mightn’t know why the coffee isn’t palatable but when they drink a coffee made from a single origin bean they’ll just know that there is something missing.
That "something" can be added by mixing in another type of bean which may have another desirable attribute or which may counter a negative attribute that the first possessed. For example if the first bean produced a coffee with a great aroma but little taste, then a bean high in taste could be added to the mix. If this combination was found to have a slightly offensive aftertaste another bean could be added so that the aftertaste became smooth and lingering. If after a few tastes one decided that the body of the coffee needed bolstering, a fourth bean could be added so that the espresso felt "full" on the palate and not thin and watery.
The process of adding different origins together to achieve an all-round coffee that suits the intended customer is what we in the industry call blending and to do it properly is a complicated and somewhat scientific process.
There are usually between two and eight different origins in most Australian coffee blends.
There are probably four main reasons that coffee is blended:
[1] Economy – some beans are used as fillers in blends. They aren’t offensive, they add body to the coffee and don’t counteract the brilliance that other beans in the blend may offer. Brazil is an example (see inset).
[2] Consistency – spreading risk should be an important part of a roaster’s job if they want to achieve a finished product that is substantially similar every time they create a batch of coffee for a certain café or restaurant. If clients are happy with their coffee then they are not going to want its taste to change from week to week. Seasonal differences and occasional hiccups in usual supply chains will result in consistency problems for a roaster which is more pronounced when there are only a couple of different origins in the blend. This problem is reduced when the taste is reliant on many beans, most of which are probably going to be reasonably consistent from roast to roast.
[3] Complementarity – if you think "synergy" is a buzz word only for high-tech companies and corporate boardrooms, think again. The concept is alive and well in the coffee industry. Blending to create a finished product that is stronger than the sum of its individual parts is an age-old pursuit by roasters all around the world who try to create that "knockout" coffee that is better than anyone else’s. As such, blends are usually trade secrets and if the origins going into making the blend aren’t, then the proportion of each origin in the blend is certainly going to be.
[4] Contrast – top chefs talk about contrasting flavours like "bitter yet sweet" or "spicy yet smooth" and as any wine or beer taster would know, these terms can apply to beverages as well. Some coffee roasters will even mix two batches of the same origin coffee together – one roasted longer than the other – to help create a blend that is full of contrasts. Blended together might also be some Latin American beans high in acidity and some Indonesian beans with big body and smoothness, in an attempt to create an interesting mouthfeel.
How Coffee is Blended
In small roasting facilities, coffee is generally blended before roasting. It’s usually as crude as scooping the beans directly out of their hessian bags and placing them straight into the hopper of the roaster.
In larger facilities there are special blending machines that look like large cement mixers. The mixer is fed by tubes leading from different hoppers storing green or roasted beans that dispense set amounts of beans according to the proportion of that origin in the overall blend. The blending machines rotate at speed for about 10 minutes, ensuring that the blend is truly "blended."
When Coffee is Blended
Coffee can either be blended before roasting (ie in the green bean form), or after the individual origins have been roasted. Some people argue that beans are best blended after the individual origins have been roasted separately so that each origin can be roasted to its full potential. As a corollary these people argue that blending before roasting means that the beans are all roasted for the same time, creating a situation whereby some beans may be under-roasted and some over-roasted.
This argument holds some water but the decision of whether to blend in the green bean form or after the individual origins have been roasted is made much more scientifically in sophisticated roasting facilities.
Technology in high-tech roasters ensures that such data as:
* average bean hardness
* average bean density
* average bean water content and
* average bean size
can be obtained from any given sample of single origin beans. This data changes from batch to batch so the above variables can only be ascertained just prior to roasting at the roasting facility. Each of these variables will feature in the decision of whether that origin is able to mixed with other origins in the blend before they are all roasted (ie in their green bean form) or whether the different origins should all be roasted individually and then blended.
An example will help clarify the above. Say a blend contains Columbian Arabica (typically large) and Indian Robusta (typically small). Roasting both together will result in either the robusta being over-roasted or the arabica being under-roasted. As they will both want different roasting times, they should therefore be roasted individually. This way, the potential of each is maximised and the blending takes place afterwards.
Case Study: Coffee Guru, Canberra
Coffee Guru has been operating a chain of highly successful coffee outlets in the ACT for several years. As espresso bars, their primary focus is on coffee with a split of takeaway and drinking-in of about 70/30.
Getting a great blend and then adequate training was the key to their success, explains co-owner Steve Ashworth. "Initially we had several meetings with our roaster and came up with a flavour profile that they were able to match perfectly. Our flavour profile was based on our intended customers. As these customers now tell us that our coffee is amongst the best in the city we feel that the time spent in getting the blend right was well worth it."
"Our blend," Ashworth explains, "is a mixture of Brazil, Indian, Ethiopian and Timorese coffee beans that are all pre-blended before they are roasted. Because of the similar bean sizes and densities pre-blending has been more successful for us than post-blending."
It is understandable why origins such as Brazil and Ethiopia have been used – after all Brazil is a staple in most blends (see inset) and Ethiopian is one of the best green beans on the market. But why Indian and Timorese green beans? According to Ashworth the Indian coffee bean is a "truly underrated bean that shines because of a mixture of the Indian climate, the high altitude that exists and the wealth of forest that exists for the coffee to grow under, often amongst spices such as pepper." The Timorese coffee bean, he says, is "smooth and consistent with a flavour reminiscent of Jamaica Blue Mountain."
Interestingly, this blend is left in the roaster for about a minute longer than most other "medium roasts" that exist in café-land so that its complexion is darker and its flavour fuller.
So don’t be disappointed when you visit your favourite café, have their coffee of the week and struggle through it wishing you hadn’t wasted your $3.50. View it as an education. For the reasons outlines above, few of your single origins whether they be Costa Rican, Columbian or Kenyan are going to have the complexities that are possessed by most highly evolved bar blends that roasters sell to their café and restaurant clients.
Appearing in Bean Scene Magazine, Issue 10, 2005
Tools of the Trade
You won’t find a mechanic fixing your car with a paintbrush or a hairdresser cutting your hair with a spanner. Many baristas however don’t use the correct tools of the trade. Their coffees are therefore often either incorrectly made, inconsistent or just plain ugly, write Matthew Gee and David Gee.
In the old days people used to make homes with their bare hands. Eventually they got the job done but the finished product was generally pretty shonky. For some odd reason, even with the wealth of training that now exists for café owners, people still make espresso without the correct tools of the trade and so their finished product is shonky too and on top of this, incredibly inconsistent.
When we talk of tools we’re talking about baristas using thermometers as they texture their milk, spatulas to help them pour their milk, timers to periodically time their pour, tampers to compact their coffee and stencils to help create interest with chocolate powder on top of their cappuccinos, hot chocolates and caffe mochas. We will look at each tool now in turn and explain their relevance to the coffee-making process.
[1] Thermometers – these are placed near the handle of your 600ml or 1 litre jug, facing you so that you can see the dial easily during the frothing process. You are aiming to achieve a temperature of 65 degrees C which actually means turning off the steam wand at 60 degrees C as the needle on the dial will wind up slightly after you have finished frothing your milk. Using a thermometer will ensure consistency in the temperature of your milk. You simply cannot achieve consistency without one.
Picture a café that doesn’t use thermometers. Poor old Mary who walks in at 11am each morning to get her weak decaf flat white gets a luke-warm coffee one day, scalds her mouth the next day and on the following day gets a coffee that is OK in temperature but not ideal. The reason that her coffees are all different temperatures is because three different baristas prepared her coffees on these days.
Mary obviously has the patience of a saint because if it was one of us, one bad experience with the temperature of our coffee and we simply don’t go back to that café. And there are lots of people like us. The solution is simple – use a thermometer and everyone gets it right every time. People who don’t use thermometers treat coffee-making as some artisan craft that is all "look and feel". These people obviously think they are like Jedi Knights and will hear a voice or get a shiver down their spine when the correct temperature has been reached.
We have been taken to task over our love of thermometers by a few café owners who claim that they have done tests in their café and 9 out of 10 times they get within 2 degrees of ideal without using a thermometer. All this does is prove our point – that even seasoned baristas get it wrong 1 out of 10 times!
Using a thermometer also takes the focus of milk frothing away from your pain threshold (how long can you hold the jug before you can take the pain no longer) and onto the swirling of the milk (where it should be).
[2] Spatulas – these are long and narrow strips of metal that come out at a slight angle from a wooden handle. They are used to help guide out froth from the jug or to hold it back (depending on whether you want more or less froth coming out of the jug). Used correctly they will speed up the process and ensure that the right amount of froth is achieved on each coffee, thereby helping to create consistency (a word that perhaps should be plastered to the foreheads of all learner baristas). We feel that spatulas are better than spoons because spoons get people into the habit of putting the jug down after the frothing process and scooping out froth and slapping it on top of their coffees. Small spatulas are better than the huge thick ones that are better suited to the 1.5 litre jug (which we don’t recommend using).
If all baristas knew how to get the right amount of froth out for the coffee they were making during the pour, the world would be a much better place. The alternative to using a spatula or a spoon is of course attempting to free-pour out the correct amount of froth. Free-pouring is a skill that takes beginner baristas a long time to perfect. We have yet to see a good flat white from a beginner barista that hasn’t turned into a caffe latte that is also presentable and achieved from a free-pour. A spatula can hold back the majority of the froth (but not all, as you want some creaminess coming into the cup) and help push a nice amount out at the end (about the size of a twenty or fifty cent coin). A skilled barista will have created beautiful, creamy milk that the thermometer can now glide through to make a simple pattern on top such as a four-leafed clover. (Ah ha – another use for the thermometer you see!).
[3] Timers – the right one will count down from thirty seconds and an alarm will ring, signalling the precise extraction that you should be aiming for in your espresso. This has been explained in our previous articles but essentially you want the extraction to take thirty seconds from the time you press the espresso button on your machine to the time the espresso finishes pouring into the cup. Espresso is all about extraction. If it comes out too quickly, like a waterfall, then your espresso will be weak and underextracted (the crema will be thin and will dissipate quickly). However if it comes out too slowly, like a slow dripping tap, then your espresso will be strong, bitter and overextracted (the crema will be dark in patches, bubbly and your espresso will smell burnt). Somewhere in the middle is where the espresso comes out with the consistency of a strand of spaghetti (the Italians might say like an inverted rat’s tail - charming!) and you will find this occurs when the extraction is between 26-30 seconds. Using a timer (or at least a seconds hand on your watch) can help achieve this perfection.
[4] Tampers – a tamper is a small metallic object that has a bulbous end on it that is pushed into your filter basket to compact your coffee. The correct use of one entails pushing down on the coffee with about 18kg of pressure then using the small end of the tamper to knock on the side of the filter basket once the first compaction has occurred (this knocks the grinds that were sitting up around the side of the filter basket back into the middle). This is then followed up with a light secondary tamp so the grinds that got ejected in the middle are now pushed down to create a consistent bed of coffee that the water can evenly run through to create your espresso.
Go to your bathroom scales at home and press down until 18kg is reached on the dial or digital display. A lot of people are surprised by just how much pressure this is.
The external metal tamper spoken of above will help you achieve a better extraction than using the hunk-of-plastic one that is connected to the grinder.
[5] Stencils – these are sheets of plastic with a shape cut out of them. They are held over a coffee and chocolate sprinkles applied over the top so that a chocolate pattern is left when the sheet is removed. The key to using them is to hold the stencil close to the top of the coffee (or hot chocolate) and liberally apply superfine chocolate drinking powder so that the shape comes out with good definition. We recommend using Indulge Your Senses drinking chocolate with a proper "mesh" chocolate shaker. Throw out the old shaker that you see people in fish and chips shops shaking salt from (actually maybe you should keep it – your three year-old will love shaking sand out of it in the back yard – just don’t use it again in the café). The metal ones that are flat on top with largish holes will not cut it if you want to master chocolate art on your coffees.
You may not want to use stencils every time you sprinkle chocolate on your coffees but it sure beats boring coffees that have chocolate haplessly dumped on top by the barista. As we’ve said before, gourmet coffee is not only about wonderful tasting coffee but presentation and creating that "wow" factor as well.
Having been hands-on operators of four cafes simultaneously, consistency has become an integral part of our vocabulary. It is what all café owners should strive for once they or their staff have perfected their coffee-making. Using the correct tools will ensure that excellent coffees can be turned out at speed with consistency, which will ensure success for any café.
Matthew Gee and David Gee currently run a wholesale coffee business in NSW and a barista training school called BARISTA BASICS Coffee Academy that operates in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney and Newcastle. They have also owned four cafes in Brisbane (still own one), have been partners in a specialty coffee roaster, have written Australia’s first textbook on coffee, produced several training videos on commercial and domestic espresso machines and are currently producing a book focussing on domestic espresso machines. Last year Matthew and David appeared on Bert Newton’s Good Morning Australia and Channel 9’s Fresh with Jeff Janstz. They have also worked as official espresso tasters for Choice Magazine’s 2004 and 2005 review of home espresso machines. They also periodically appear on Ella James’ Saturday night radio program on Sydney’s 2UE. In 2005 they appeared on Mornings with Kerrie-Anne Kennerley on Channel 9 and Today Extra with Nat Jeffrey on NBN3.
Ó & Ô 2005 David Gee and Matthew Gee
No part of this article may be reproduced without the express permission of the authors
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