Single Origin vs. Blends or What's in My Coffee?

When you take a drink of your coffee and put you cup down, do you ever wonder what kind of coffee is in the Kona Coffee or your favorite Breakfast Blend?  A lot of coffees on the shelves have names that really refer to either roast profiles such as French Roast or have names that have nothing to do with the type of coffee but rather as a way to sell coffee such as breakfast blend or espresso. 

So why does it matter what kind of coffee is in your cup?  The short answer is that each origin of coffee has a unique taste and if the coffee is blended you may not get all the nuances of that coffee. 

Before we delve into both single origin and blends, I want to let you know up-front that I am not knocking blends, because if done well they can meld flavors and create a wonderful coffee all its own.  I just want you to be more educated when you walk down the coffee aisle as to what you are getting and help you to make wiser choices to help you on your quest for your perfect cup-o-joe.

One of the comments I hear quite often is: "I can’t taste the difference between coffees.  Coffee’s coffee."  As a coffee roaster, I cringe at that statement because I have tasted the differences and have found my favorites. I know that drinking coffee can be a wonderful experience and when I hear statements like that I know they have not had that experience. 

What I am hearing when I listen to customers is all coffee tastes the same and that is what some coffee roasters are trying to do make all coffee the same.  They want a consistent product roast after roast after roast January thru December.  The problems with that are first coffee is an agricultural product and as such has seasons just like the produce you grow in your garden and second each origin has a roast profile which brings out the best of the coffee. 

Single origin coffees are coffees that only have one origin of coffee in them.  Some roasters go so far as to only have one estate’s coffee in a roast.  This gives the roaster the ability to bring out the best flavors of the coffee and this gives you the opportunity to drink each coffee and truly taste what each has to offer.  Do you taste the earthiness of the Indonesians or the creamy richness of the Kenyans?  Do you taste the green grapes of the Columbians? 

You are also able to get the true aromas of each coffee that will help in your taste adventure.  Most of the time you will be able to tell when a roaster is selling single origin coffees by the name that is on the bag.  They will have names like Sumatra, Columbian, Kenyan, or Brazilian.  Then they are usually followed by a second word which indicates a more specific region such as Sumatran Mandheling which comes from the Mandheling region of Sumatra.  Some coffees do use a grade word such as Columbian Supremo which refers not to the region in Columbia but to the best grade of coffee that comes from Columbia.  So look for names of countries and this will be a good start to determine if the coffee is single origin or a blended coffee.

Blends on the other hand work to give you consistency in both what you can buy and the taste you experience.  Blends use to be a way for coffee roasters to use a little of the good Arabica beans and blend them with a cheaper bean (maybe even a Robusta) to make their coffee cheaper in price.  Of course this always gave an inferior cup of coffee. 

Now blends are starting to elevate to an art.  A skilled roaster will take into account all the flavors of the coffees he is contemplating blending and try to use these flavors to enhance the others and to come up with a unique taste.  Each coffee has a weakness in the flavor profile and so a skilled blender will use coffees that are able to build on each other to produce an excellent cup of coffee. 

It is a true art form to make a good coffee blend and one that is hard to find.  So look for a local roaster who does their own blending because they will know what coffees they have and which ones will blend well.  The names of blends are really left up to the blend master. 

One of the coffees we carry at River City Roasters is a Midnight Blend.  I named it that because I use two very dark roasted coffees that I custom blended for a customer.  She enjoys that deep dark taste and the name seemed to fit when I looked at the coffee.  Other names are breakfast blend, Daybreak, Milstone has a coffee called Foglifter.  The names of blends are only limited by the imagination of the blender.

There it is: Single Origin vs Blends. Both have their pros and cons and both are great choices as long as the roaster you are buying from knows what he or she is doing.  So experiment and find a coffee that you enjoy.  They do taste different and your perfect cup of coffee is out there you just have to search for it.