Kens Espresso Fueled Ramblings

I’m a Single Origin person ever since I started home roasting some years ago.

I started with blends for espresso just because I was learning and didn’t need the extra complexity with all the other variables I was trying to keep in check.

Then I started home roasting. First on a cheap popcorn popper, that was fun for a while. I switched to the heatgun method so I could get more volume and finally ended up getting a Gene Cafe.

That’s what got me into single origin coffees for my espresso. The thing is, for me at least, that very very few blends I have tried, both my own and from various roasters have given me that experience of what single origin coffees can give. With blends you get something that’s very reproduceable and that’s fine I guess. But blends mostly well.. blends everything into something more boring and generic “chocolatety” coffee taste.

With single origin shots of espresso I can get things like wonderful musky earthy nuttyness of a Monsooned Malabar, blueberry punch of a Harrar, deep chocolate with spices of a Mandheling.

Single origin coffees are just more exciting to me, with blends, sure there’s a little bit of everything in there sometimes, but it’s like you have to realy try to taste them and most of the time it’s just a generic coffee taste, with single origin you get hit over the head with the flavour and uniqueness of that particular coffee bean whereas a blend just compromises every bean in the blend for the sake of uniformness.

With blends you also have different coffees that likes different temperatures and dose to be optimal. That means you’r never going to hit the sweet spot of them all.

One thing I like to do is roast the same bean to different levels and use that as a kind of semi-blend, many beans have wildly different taste profiles at different roast levels. Roasted lightly and the flower and fruit notes comes out, roasted darker and the nuts and chocolate comes out, blend these and you can realy get something out of this world.

The only real problem with using Single Origin coffees for espresso is that you better have the best beans and roast them perfectly. Any defects will also hit you over the head.