What is the difference between single item, SOE and blended coffee? What does SOE mean? What is blended coffee?

Recently, many friends have started to buy coffee beans and plan to make coffee at home. However, because coffee beans can be distinguished according to different extraction methods, such as individual products, SOE and blends. So this makes it difficult for some friends who don't know much about it, who don't know how to choose how to do it at all. So a friend came to Qianjie store to consult how Qianjie should choose.

In fact, Qianjie has always shared relevant content in the article, but most of the time it is a simple generalization. So today, Qianjie will share in detail: what is the difference between individual products, SOE, and blended coffee beans, and how we should choose coffee beans according to our own equipment and preferences.

The first thing to introduce individual coffee beans is the single coffee bean "single origin coffee", which is what we often call boutique coffee beans. Individual coffee beans refer to coffee beans from a single origin, which can not only refer to a country, but also refer to a producing area, a manor, or even a specific plot.

Because single-product coffee beans mainly emphasize the characteristic flavor of coffee producing area, most of the single-product coffee beans on the market generally use moderate, medium-shallow, or even very shallow roasting degree, in order to better show the flavor performance of coffee. But the front street here does not mean that all coffee beans are medium-shallow roasted, such as Blue Mountain, Brazil, Mantenin and other individual coffee is the classic deep roasting. If your coffee is made by hand brewing, French presser, siphon pot, Philharmonic pressure, cold extraction and other ways other than Italian coffee machine, then individual coffee beans is a very good choice. Because these production methods will have a higher fault tolerance rate, can ensure that the value of individual coffee beans can be "squeezed" to the maximum extent!

Again, this does not mean that individual beans cannot be used in the production of espresso. Of course, but when we use a single bean in a wishful concentrated extraction, espresso has a chic name-SOE.

The full name of SOESOE is "single origin Espresso", which translates to espresso made from coffee beans from a single origin. In other words, SOE is an espresso made from individual coffee beans. Similarly, the purpose of using individual coffee beans to make espresso is still to emphasize the characteristic flavor of the producing area, but the main reason why people need to be distinguished from single beans is that not all single beans are suitable for making SOE. For example, those lightly baked beans are not suitable for making SOE.

The reason is very simple, because espresso will involve the production of milk coffee. The flavor of lightly roasted coffee beans is mainly fresh, will not be particularly rich, so if they are made into milk coffee, then the taste will be easily covered by milk. If you want to use them to make good milk coffee, you need to modify a lot of parameters and make a lot of adjustments; another reason is that some coffee beans will have a more prominent sour taste. and too prominent sour taste will form a sharp contrast with the taste of milk, this contrast is not a positive performance, is very abrupt.

Therefore, not all coffee beans are suitable for making espresso. To be exact, the espresso they make is not suitable for making milk coffee. But this is not without a solution. By deepening the roasting of coffee beans, we can make espresso made from individual beans compatible with the production of milk coffee.

The depth of roasting affects the taste and flavor of coffee beans! For example, the more shallow the coffee beans are roasted, the higher the acidity of the coffee made from it. And the deeper the coffee beans are roasted, the less sour we can drink from the coffee, both because the acid is worn away during roasting and because it is masked by other aromas produced by roasting. Therefore, by deepening the roasting degree of coffee beans, we can reduce the acid in the coffee, make it more compatible with the production of milk coffee, and make the coffee have a better taste. The only disadvantage is that the flavor experience of the place of origin will be reduced a little. As the saying goes, you can't have both fish and bear paws.

Because this kind of beans specially made for espresso will have a relatively deep baking degree (deeper than the regular light roasted beans), in order to distinguish them from the regular single beans, the merchants will specially add the word SOE to the beans' profile or selected fields. For example, SOE uses beans, SOE bakes and so on. If your coffee is made mainly in Italian style, and then you want to get a more direct understanding of the flavor of the coffee and not too much acid, then you can choose single beans baked by soe or regular beans, but there will be more restrictions and there are more aspects that need to be adjusted.

Blending coffee beans is the final way to match beans! Blending coffee beans is the most common type of coffee beans used in espresso. Blended coffee beans "blend coffee", also known as mixed coffee, refers to beans made of coffee beans from different producing areas and different treatments.

The birth of matching can be understood as a human being: not only want, but also want. Everyone wants to get all the high-quality experiences from a single coffee bean, such as excellent coffee flavor, mellow coffee taste, and then pleasant price and high stability, which are often difficult to be realized on a single coffee bean. For example, although the flavor of light-roasted coffee is the most complete, its taste is relatively inferior, while deep-roasted coffee has a mellow and excellent taste, but its flavor performance is not so rich. Then coffee beans belong to agricultural products, and the quality of coffee beans every year is affected by other external factors such as the climate during their growth period. So, if you want to get all the advantages from a single coffee bean, it's a very difficult thing.

The blending of coffee beans can help you achieve your ideal, because through blending, we can achieve the effect of 1: 1 greater than 2. For example, combine the flavor of A beans with the taste of B beans to get a coffee with excellent flavor and taste, or we can use coffee beans from three different producing areas to dilute the importance of each bean! In this way, when one of the coffee beans is not so good in the coming year because of the weather in the producing area, it can be replaced by coffee beans from other producing areas, because its importance is diluted in the whole coffee bean, so even if it is replaced, it will not have much effect on the taste (as was the purpose of the earlier blending). This can also help you reduce costs and make a cost-effective coffee bean. For specific practices, you can refer to this article → "how to mix coffee beans?" ", the front street will not repeat too much.

Since ancient times, blended beans have been widely used in the production of espresso, so the design of blended beans will be based on the use of espresso. For example, the use of a relatively deep degree of baking (more suitable for the production of milk coffee), as well as 1 pound, 1 kg and other large packaging design (a single bean is usually half a pound or 100g packaging). If your coffee beans are mainly used for making espresso, it will be a very good choice for Italian coffee beans. They will not only have a more suitable baking degree of espresso, but also have a higher performance-to-price ratio. But the quality needs to be chosen according to your wallet. If you just want to supplement your daily caffeine, then a combination of commercial coffee beans will suffice, usually at a price of 50-80 / lb, which is a combination used by most coffee shops.

And if you want coffee to have a better flavor, then you can choose to use a combination of boutique coffee beans. For example, the warm sun mix in Qianjie store is made of two boutique coffee beans, but its price is usually twice as high as that of commercial matching, so make your own choice, ha-END-