What is COE Coffee Bean? The difference between COE and SOE coffee characteristics soe coffee full meaning taste

As more and more people drink boutique coffee, many friends will learn more about boutique coffee, and then many English acronyms emerge, making it difficult for many friends to study in depth. For example, there are people who can't tell the difference between COE and SOE.

Actually, COE and SOE are two completely different concepts. The full name of COE is Cup of Excellence, also known as "Excellence Cup". It is the most important boutique coffee raw bean competition in the world. First held in Brazil in 1999 by the Coffee Excellence Organization (ACE,The Alliance for Coffee Excellence), it is currently the most well-known and authoritative competition for raw beans of fine coffee in the world, and it is also the most credible competition to judge fine coffee.

The competition consists of a panel of international cup testers. Coffee beans will take part in at least five cup tests during the three-week competition, and the coffee that wins the top 10 will have another round of extra matches. Coffee farmers who can be selected as the winners of COE not only have recognized the excellent quality of their coffee, but also have made considerable profits from the auction. With good auction revenue, coffee farmers have a better chance to improve their quality, and consumers have more opportunities to drink good coffee, forming a virtuous circle.

The competition system was adopted by coffee production groups in Brazil in 1999 and is now widely used in Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. It has to be mentioned that this year is the first time for Ethiopia to hold the COE Excellence Cup competition and auction.

The whole COE Excellence Cup competition will be divided into three stages: the primary stage (Pre-selection), the domestic campaign stage (National jury) and the international campaign stage (International jury).

1. In the pre-selection stage (Pre-selection), all the judges are from domestic professional judges, and no judges from ACE will participate in it. The domestic jury is usually composed of 12-18 people, who have very strict requirements on the roasting degree of coffee beans, the process of cup testing activities, and so on, and each bean has been strictly examined.

In the primary stage, only coffee beans with a cup test score of 85 or more are eligible to enter the domestic campaign. In this primary stage, 1459 beans participated in the primary election. After the first round of cup test screening, 150 coffee beans were selected to reach the domestic election stage.

two。 In the domestic campaign stage (National jury), the judges are the same as those in the pre-selection stage, and they are all professional cup test reviews from China. In this stage, two rounds of cup tests will be carried out. In the first round, 90 beans with 85 points or more will be reserved from the 150 coffee beans in the preliminary competition for the second round of cup tests.

In the second round of cup test, 40 coffee beans with 85 points or more were selected from the 90 coffee beans to enter the international campaign stage.

Therefore, COE is a highly authoritative raw bean competition in the world.

Qianjie took part in the auction for the first time in the first COE raw bean competition in Ethiopia in 2020, and jointly auctioned the 22nd coffee beans with other bean merchants. The flavor is citrus, litchi, honey, cream, fermented flavor.

The full name of SOE is Single Origin Espresso, which means espresso. It refers to espresso made from coffee beans from a single origin, which is obviously different from the traditionally used Italian beans.

Now many coffee shops have launched SOE, usually only need to add a few yuan to the original price to change into SOE coffee beans. The characteristic of SOE is that the baking degree is slightly shallow and can show the flavor characteristics of a single producing area.

With the concept of boutique coffee becoming more and more popular, coffee lovers' pursuit of coffee flavor is reflected from single hand brewed coffee to single espresso. This also makes many people form a habitual thinking that the flavor of SOE coffee is better than that of mixed coffee.

Must SOE taste better than espresso made with coffee beans?

Not necessarily! Some SOE do have flavor and mellow thickness, and will have a special performance after adding milk / water. But in most cases, after trying a cup of SOE-based coffee drink, people will think, "it's not that amazing, it's not as good as mixing coffee beans." "Why did this happen?

One is that coffee as a crop, even if the same coffee bean, climate, soil planting influence / baking ideas are different, there will be some differences in flavor. If you drink a very good SOE coffee in a cafe and find the same coffee beans after a while, but it doesn't feel as good as before, maybe the coffee beans are in a new season / roasting thinking has changed, so that the flavor of the coffee beans itself is different.

In the past, people thought that the quality of individual coffee beans was general, and the flavor of extracted espresso was very different, so they thought that the flavor of espresso could be improved by blending coffee beans, which could solve the problem that no matter when the coffee beans were harvested or baked, the difference in espresso flavor in the same store was too big due to the failure of this coffee bean.

The second is to show a clear coffee flavor, many will choose some light roasted single-product coffee beans. Although the flavor of shallow roasted coffee beans is obvious, they often lack mellow thickness. Maybe this coffee bean has a balanced flavor and no lack of body when making hand-brewed coffee, but after making espresso, because the extraction time is not long, the mellow substance of the lightly roasted coffee beans has not been released so that it is thin. After adding milk / water, the taste of the coffee is not obvious directly, and it tastes ordinary.

So people no longer confuse COE with SOE.

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