Share:

As home roasters we enjoy roasting our own beans.  We love the opportunity to experience the various flavors of Specialty Grade Arabica Beans from around the globe.  We experiment with roast levels, taste the differences, and develop our personal favorites.   And we LOVE to save money in the process. 

And then, since that’s not fun and interesting enough, we blend the beans to tease out even more complexity and flavor.  But where to begin?  We’ve pulled together 5 tips to help you produce successful blends without a ton of wasteful experimenting.   We’re including a few classic blend recipes, links to recommended beans, and one big surprise we had this week!

Basic guidelines:

  1. Choosing Beans: Try to combine beans that have different but complimentary characteristics.  For example, Costa Rica beans are medium bodied, have great aroma, and often exhibit bright citrus and chocolate flavors.  Sumatra beans produce coffee that is heavy bodied, and generate earthy flavors.  Blending them produces a complex cup that captures the best elements of each bean. A typical restaurant or coffee shop “House Blend” is 50% Costa Rican and 50% Sumatra.

 

Try this blend:

Costa Rica Cafe Vida

Sumatra Aceh – Harimau Tiger 

 

Finally, stick with only 100% Specialty Grade Arabica beans in your blends.  Avoid the temptation to blend lower quality Arabica or Robusta beans to save money – you’ll only lose flavor.

  1. Roast Together or Separate:  Should you roast the beans together in one batch or separately?  Both methods are fine, and it really depends on the blend.  Let’s construct a classic “Breakfast Blend” which consists of Costa Rica, Ethiopian, and Colombian.  If you roast them together and follow your roast profile for Costa Rica to Medium Dark (Full City) which goes just into 2nd crack, in the finished product the Costa Rican and Colombian beans are a bit lighter than the Ethiopian, which produces a deep flavored cup of coffee.  It has a hint of “roasty” or nutty flavor from the darker Ethiopian bean.  This element complements the brightness of the Costa Rican and the smoothness of the Colombian.  But there is nothing wrong with roasting them separately to different roast levels and combining when you grind.  It’s all good.

 

Try this blend:

Costa Rica Cafe Vida

Colombian Excelso – Gran Galope

Ethiopian Yirgacheffe

 

  1. Toss the Playbook: Have you ever heard the story about how 3M post-it notes were discovered as the result of a “mistake” in experiments that were trying to produce stronger adhesives?  And the iconic yellow paper – it was just leftover stock?  Well, we had our own “Eureka” moment last week.   We were cupping medium roast (City Roast) samples of some new offerings and had leftover Mexican Chiapas Cristal and Papua New Guinea Keto Tapasi Chauve Fair Trade Organic sitting on our kitchen counter.   Marty was making coffee the next morning and, on a whim, combined them 50/50 in the grinder - and the result was outstanding! Smooth, easy-drinking, and robust without any of the tartness you often experience at lighter roasts. We haven’t named this one yet, so we offer it to you as “Eureka Blend”.  Have fun with this one and experiment with different ratios and roast levels.

 

Try this blend:

Mexican Chiapas – Cristal

Papua New Guinea – Keto Tapasi – Chauve – Fair Trade Organic

 

  1. Share Your Results:  As you experiment and develop your own personal blends, we’d be happy to share your results with our customers.  Just email us at info@u-roast-em.com and we’ll include them on our website and in future newsletters.

 

  1. Buy ready-made.  Still too much to think about?  No problem. Try a prepackaged blend and use that to learn.  Jane at U-Roast-Em has developed several curated blends that you can roast right out of the bag.

 

From our customer Tim:

Subject Line: We really should call this Jane’s Blend

Just roasted the beans yesterday. I'm sitting with my second cup of Campfire Blend.  

This is just a wonderful cup of coffee!  Definitely one of my all time favorites!  Great job Jane!!

Campfire Blend

Comments and Questions: As you start your blending journey, feel free to contact us anytime with thoughts or questions and we’ll do our best to provide guidance.  Voice/text/email contact information is below.  We also respond to messages on our Facebook/Instagram pages within hours (usually minutes).

tracking