Roaming Blender

I'm back from the Roasters Guild Retreat richer in knowledge and poorer in the wallet (I won a 1 pound Diedrich SR-1 sample roaster at the silent auction to benefit the Sumatra Relief Fund). It was a lot of fun. I had the opportunity to have fascinating conversations with roasters from many places with varied backgrounds, the educational sessions were interesting and often lively, and the venue was gorgeous. Now, back to work!

I needed to continue developing new versions of blends using French Roast: Big Island Blend, Breakfast Blend, European Blend, and Viking Blend Espresso.

European Blend was the easiest. The recipe used with the previous French Roast works well with the new French Roast.

I had tried the existing recipe for Big Island Blend with the new French Roast before leaving. It didn't work. This blend is usually made only with Papua New Guinea and French Roast, with a third ingredient occasionally used if those do not give me the flavor I want. I decided to prepare five presses of coffee, each with a different Papua New Guinea:French Roast ratio. From this I found two very good blends.

As I tasted these, I found the blend of 70% Papua New Guinea and 30% French Roast had considerably more character and held up better as the cup cooled.

Breakfast Blend was probably the most challenging blend to figure out. In addition to the change in French Roast, I could not use Java Estate. These coffees made up 85% of the old blend. I tried several things, getting coffees that tasted good, but not like Breakfast Blend, before thinking that I should try using Kenya AA.

This gave me a coffee with good aroma and a strong, sweet flavor. The only problem was that it did not taste dark enough.

Three of the coffees in this blend, French Roast, Guatemalan, and Sulawesi, are dark roast coffees. I tried bumping each of these up individually quite a bit, reducing the amount of the others used, knowing that I would probably overshoot my target flavor profile. I wanted to see how these changes altered the taste of the coffee. Adding more Guatemalan made the blend uninteresting, but the other two were quite good. I prepared a pot of the existing Breakfast Blend for comparison and found that I got a very good match by blending the sample with extra French Roast and the sample with extra Sulawesi.

This final check on the blend tastes just like the old Breakfast Blend, but has more intensity in the flavor. I don't consider that to be a flaw as it tastes better.

Viking Blend Espresso is often a difficult coffee to figure out as I am particular in what I consider to be a good espresso. This latest adjustment to the blend was very simple. We were brewing the new Vienna Roast made from Tanzanian Peaberry today so the sweet fruity taste of that coffee was on my mind. I decided that I could use that to add sweetness and complexity to the shot. I then considered the Papua New Guinea. I really like using that in espresso, but with it already in French Roast I decided that including more at a medium roast, especially when combined with the Vienna Roast, would just unbalance the cup. I would need one more coffee to supply a little more body and I suspected that the Sumatran I had been using just would not fit this new formula. I decided to try Sulawesi Toraja to bring in the smoky, spicy notes.

This turned out to be excellent and I cannot think of anything that would improve this blend. The cup is completely without fault.

The auction lot of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe was scheduled to arrive in Rotterdam today. Now it just needs to cross the Atlantic, go through the Panama canal, head up the coast to California, and travel here by truck. I expect to have my new sample roaster running by then and look forward to trying this coffee in it. We should have a few other new coffees in before the Ethiopian arrives.