Why is SOE single espresso so expensive and delicious? Recommendation for making SOE coffee beans

When you go to a coffee shop and order a latte / American style, you can often hear the shopkeeper ask you, "do you want SOE or do you want it mixed?" At that time, you always had this thought: "Ah?" What's the difference?! But it looks more expensive, it should taste a lot better! Then try SOE. "

What a fat thing is SOE?!

SOE (single origin espresso) represents espresso made from beans from a single producing area / region / estate. The use of individual coffee beans to make espresso first appeared in the 2007 World Barista Competition. The emergence of SOE also broke the idea that espresso only needs to have a stable bitter taste (not derogatory here) and can reflect the mellow flavor of coffee after adding milk / water, so it is often achieved by blending coffee beans to achieve flavor stability.

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.

Third, pressurized extraction will over-enlarge the flavor of coffee beans, which is easy to produce unpleasant performance. Qianjie daily hand-washed Ye Jia Xuefei coffee beans are extracted by hand, the flavor is obvious in citrus, flower, honey and tea. If the same coffee bean is used to extract espresso, the flavor is easy to show acidity and acidity, and people tremble after drinking it.

In the case of hand-brewed coffee, for example, most delicious coffee beans are lightly roasted, but they do not necessarily perform well when used in pressurized coffee machine extraction. So when buying individual coffee beans to make SOE, you can choose moderately roasted coffee beans or single coffee beans specifically for SOE.

How do you know if a store's SOE is successful?

This can be divided into two parts. Part of it is to know the concept of SOE / enthusiasts who come to this store because of SOE are satisfied with this cup of coffee / can keep thinking about it; part is to make friends who don't have the concept of SOE think that this cup of coffee is better than ordinary coffee.