Single item, matching, SOE? What is the best Italian milk coffee made of beans? How do you make a latte?

As one of the most popular coffees, latte is not only the top-selling product in countless cafes, but also the first Italian coffee that many lovers taste at home. Regarding the production of lattes, the front street often receives various questions, among which the voice about "how to choose coffee beans" is the highest. This article will teach you how to choose coffee beans that meet the heart water.

latte, translated from caffè latte, coffee with milk. In general terms, anything that's laced with black coffee can be called a latte. Therefore, in addition to the special Italian concentrated + milk fancy coffee in the industry, in the eyes of many new pot friends, mocha pot, French press pot, hand flush, siphon, ear bag and other ways of making black coffee, after adding milk belong to the category of "latte."

The appearance of this drinking method, in the final analysis, is that everyone thinks that the taste of pure black coffee is too bitter, hoping to reconcile it by adding milk to improve its palatability, while also adding a hint of sweetness to the coffee. When people make this kind of black coffee and milk, they are not limited by the steps, and secondly, they don't pay too much attention to the details of proportion, temperature, milk foam and so on. As long as they like it, they think coffee tastes good enough. Then in the choice of coffee beans, naturally also has a larger display space. Friends who like this kind of milk coffee, if they are also worried about choosing beans, may wish to refer to the former street once popular science "How to make homemade hand-brewed milk coffee better to drink?"

But if we drink a cup of rich Italian latte in a coffee shop and want to reproduce it at home, then the first keyword we should look for should be "Italian beans", that is, to find a product that matches the espresso machine and the bean grinder.

It is not difficult to find that the coffee bean products commonly available on the market today can be roughly divided into two categories: Italian coffee beans and hand-brewed coffee beans. The reason is very simple, Italian and hand brewing are the two most mainstream coffee extraction models. So before we buy coffee beans, we first have to determine how we make "milk coffee" and then choose according to taste.

Of course, Qianjie does not mean that buying Italian coffee beans can not be brewed in the form of hand brewing, or hand brewing beans can not be used in Italian machines, but the coffee beans sold by merchants will generally be based on different extraction methods to formulate the corresponding roasting curve (roasting degree), so that coffee beans in the matching brewing conditions can show good results.

For a simple example, there are two kinds of Kongjia on the Ethiopian bean list on the front street. One is used for drip extraction based on hand flushing. In order to emphasize the bright fruit acid of lemon and citrus, light baking is adopted; and the other is to adapt to Italian machine, French press pot and other pressurized heating brewing, so that the extracted SOE can have both fruit acid and caramelized aroma, and the baking curve is adjusted to medium baking.

As a matter of experience in extraction, Qianjie recommends the use of Italian blended coffee beans with higher stability. Blended products usually combine the flavor types of different producing areas, and then use moderate baking, it is easier to extract rich fat (coffee beans with high fat are more suitable for milk coffee), so that we make concentrated taste thick and rich, fault tolerance rate is also higher. Moreover, most Italian-style mixed beans are mainly used in stores. Compared with single beans of the same type of flavor, the price is relatively low, and it is mainly an economical and cost-effective route. For beginners who don't have much coffee making experience, it is obviously more advantageous to use Italian beans to make a good latte.

However, as mentioned above, most of the blended beans sold on the market tend to be deeply roasted and have a single taste. The espresso coffee made will be mainly caramelized aroma, such as black chocolate, cream and nuts. A new generation of coffee lovers, deeply influenced by the concept of single-item coffee, prefer to drink unique flavor types such as floral, fruit acid and fermentation from coffee rather than pursuing stable extraction and rich fat, so they shift the direction of latte beans to the category of hand-brewed single items to find lighter roasted coffee beans with more prominent flavor and aroma, which is often referred to as SOE.

When we use lighter roasted coffee bean extract concentrate, because the coffee bean roasting time is shorter, the internal texture is harder, the flavor is more difficult to fully release, and after adding milk, it is more tasteless. Therefore, it is necessary to adjust various parameters to improve the extraction rate, such as extending the extraction time, increasing the water temperature, adjusting the grinding degree, increasing the amount, etc., and the difficulty coefficient is much higher than that of deep-baked beans.

Therefore, if you are also inclined to SOE latte, Qianjie recommends making it with medium roast or flavor (fruity, fragrant) single beans, which can avoid the strong and stimulating coffee taste caused by the factors of too light roast.

For example, SOE milk coffee extracted from sun-dried coffee beans in the current street will present the flavor of passion fruit, tangerine, cream, etc.; Costa Rica strawberry sugar coffee made with raisin honey has obvious orange fragrance, preserved fruit and rose petal aroma; and SOE latte presented by anaerobic sun-dried Santa Vini coffee beans has blueberry, dried mango and fermented fruit flavor.

- END -

Front Street Cafe

No.10 Baoanqian Street, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province