Enjoying a cup of our House Blend in cafe?
Perhaps you've just bought your first bag online or from our Roastery and want to dive a little deeper into what makes our House Blend so enjoyable, so lets dive in.
What is a blend?
On our coffee menu you'll notice it's divided into two sections, Single Origins, and Blends. Our Single origin coffees will typically rotate and change fairly frequently, we take smaller amounts from select farms as fresh crops come available and showcase these coffees with distinct roast profiles designed to bring their natural distinct flavour to the surface.
Our approach to blends is slightly different, a coffee blend is typically made up of multiple coffees, carefully selected to work in harmony with each other to create a specific flavour profile we're aiming for, often for a specific brewing method, that can available all year round. Throughout the year the components that make up that blend will be rotated out and changed as fresh crops come available, aiming to keep that consistent flavour profile throughout the year.
What makes up the House Blend?
Over the past few years, we've dedicated extensive effort to craft our signature house blend. Through meticulous adjustments of components and ratios, our objective has been to curate a blend that has traits of a modern, approachable espresso blend, while also embodying the core values of specialty coffee.
Collaborating with exceptional producers across South America and Africa, we roast these components to their own individually curated medium roast profile. They're then blended post roast in their specific ratios, combined to yield a cup that exudes a sweet character of chocolates, caramels & sweet fruit notes to create a consistently available, yet distinct, interesting espresso available throughout every season.
Our House Blend is made up of 3 core components, Brazil, Colombia, and Ethiopia.
We selected these three coffees for our house blend from the very beginning to provide a balanced harmony of flavour with each other, and as each component is rotated out within the blend, it gives us an opportunity to assess the ratio of each coffee, to create that balanced flavour profile we're aiming to achieve with our House Blend.
How we roast our House Blend?
Roasting our House Blend is a different approach to how we typically roast our single origin coffees, our House Blend is primarily an Espresso Blend, and for that reason we curate our roast profile to favour that brewing method.
Each component of our Blend is roasted individually, to its own profile and in its own way. This ensures we're getting the best out of every origin that makes up the blend, and we are able to control how developed (Light/Medium/Dark) each component is, by doing this we're able to manipulate elements like Body, Acidity, Sweetness in each component...so we start roasted components that have been developed for Espresso and are ready to be blended..
Once each origin is roasted, cooled and ready, we then blend.
In Blending (mixing the different coffees together) we are able to manipulate ratios to control the flavour profile of our House Blend, typically we work on the following blend recipe for our House Blend.
- 60% Brazil
- 30% Colombia
- 10% Ethiopia
We find this mixture gives out that silky, chocolate, sweet, complex and 'morish' espresso that works great with Milk.
However, that isn't always the case, every time we change a component of the blend, say...a fresh crop of Colombia comes available to replace the current Colombia being used in the blend when we run out of that particular coffee, we will re-assess the ratios used to ensure that we're still achieving that delicious and approachable espresso recipe that we're so well known for.
Drinking our House Blend?
Want to know how/why we dial in our House Blend on Espresso? We follow a specific 'recipe' for brewing Espresso to bring out the best of our coffee without over extracting or brewing bitter, unpleasant coffee.
This recipe is as follows -
Espresso Brew guide - 92c Brew Temp, 2.5 Second Pre-Infusion.
18g in ~ 36g out ~ 28 seconds.
However if you wanted to dig a little deeper? You can always watch this video on us brewing some House Blend in our roastery!