About House Blend :

Let’s start by thinking about why blends are created in the first place.  One main reason is to create a signature flavor profile that can become synonymous with a brand.  Nearly ever coffee roaster in today’s marketplace has a “house blend” available for both filter (drip) coffee, and espresso.  Some coffee roasters even brand specific blends for specific coffee house clients as an added benefit of working together.  For a coffee shop business owner, this can be a great way to create a sense of identity with your customers and to provide a specific experience that can’t be found elsewhere.  It is also beneficial for roasters because they can switch out coffees within the blend throughout the year based on seasonality while maintaining a pretty consistent flavor profile.

The problem is that some coffee roasters will source lower quality (thus, cheaper) coffees to comprise the ingredients of their blends in hopes to create a final product that is more cost-effective.  Since the coffees are blended, the high points and low points of the taste profile can become more subdued. Many believe that because this happens they can “get away” with using more inferior coffees that might be one-dimensional, or un-remarkable on their own, but perhaps blended together the end product will be more balanced.  It’s true that coffees that are great in different ways can lend their characteristics to a blend to create a harmonious flavor profile, however, it is not true that bad coffees will be made better by blending them with other bad coffees.

If done properly a blend can be balanced and delicious and will incorporate the flavors of the individual coffees to achieve profiles that couldn’t be found in single-origin coffees.  If done poorly, it will taste like what it is: bad coffee.

Within the specialty community, blends are often created with different high-quality coffee beans to produce a unique and complex profile. This is done by tasting each of the coffees, noting their uniqueness, and deciding what they would pair well with.

At Libta Coffee, we would need to decide which single-origin coffees pair well together, decide the proportionality, for example, 50% Malaysia Liberica and 50% Colombia Supremo, roast the batch and taste using the cupping technique. Once been tested we are happy with the blend and proportions we’ve set, then we need to properly profile the coffee and keep a note of what we liked. It can become a little bit more work to be done because the time we put into our research to find the right blend isn’t a quick process.

Our House Blend Coffee