Why Rustic Roast Is a Blend, Not a Single Origin
Single origin coffee gets a lot of attention in specialty coffee.
And for good reason.
If you want to taste what one farm, region or particular coffee has to offer, a good single origin can be really interesting.
When I'm building a coffee specifically for espresso, I'm not asking which individual bean is the most interesting on its own.
I'm asking what I want the finished shot to taste like.
For Rustic Roast, that answer is pretty straightforward.
I want body. I want sweetness. I want chocolate and caramel. I want texture. I want enough roast character that the espresso actually tastes like espresso.
A blend lets us build the whole cup
Different coffees bring different things to the table.
One coffee might have a lot of sweetness but not quite enough body for the espresso we're trying to make. Another might add depth and structure but need something else to round the cup out.
Blending lets us think about those coffees as pieces of a finished product.
The goal isn't to hide anything.
The goal is to build something.
That's especially useful with espresso because espresso is concentrated. There isn't much room for a coffee to hide once you're pushing that much flavor into a small shot.
If something is missing, you notice it.
Why not just use a single origin?
We do roast single-origin coffees, and single origins can make excellent espresso.
It just depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
With a single origin, you're choosing to let that particular coffee define the shot. Sometimes that's exactly what you want.
Rustic Roast has a different job.
It's our house espresso.
I want somebody to come into Bee & Brew, order an espresso, and get the kind of traditional shot we actually like drinking.
Full bodied. Sweet. Chocolate and caramel. Enough weight that it still works beautifully in a cappuccino or Americano.
I'm not trying to make Rustic Roast the fruitiest or most unusual espresso we can possibly produce.
I'm trying to make a really good traditional espresso.
Those aren't always the same thing.
Blending also gives us room to keep the style consistent
Coffee is an agricultural product.
Crops change. Green coffee changes. Even when you're buying from the same place, one harvest isn't going to be exactly identical to the next one forever.
A blend gives a roaster more room to protect the overall style of the coffee as those individual pieces change.
That doesn't mean the goal is making coffee taste exactly identical forever.
It means we know what Rustic Roast is supposed to be.
If one component starts pushing the cup in the wrong direction, we have more than one tool available to bring it back.
That's important for a house espresso because people should have a pretty good idea of what they're getting when they come back.
The roast is only half the job
This is probably my favorite part of doing coffee the way we do it at Bee & Brew.
We roast Rustic Roast here in Fort Worth.
Then we walk it over to the espresso machine and pull it.
If something isn't right, we know.
Maybe the grind needs to change. Maybe the shot needs to change. Or maybe I need to go back to the roaster and change something there.
That's one of the reasons I enjoy espresso so much.
Roasting and extraction aren't two completely separate things for us. I get to work on both sides of the cup.
We pull Rustic Roast on our lever machine, which also gives the espresso its own extraction character. If you're curious about how that works, read What Is Lever Espresso? Why We Still Pull Espresso the Old Way.
Rustic Roast was built for espresso
There are plenty of coffees that happen to work as espresso.
Rustic Roast was built for it.
Every decision comes back to the shot we're trying to make.
Body.
Sweetness.
Chocolate.
Caramel.
Texture.
Enough roast character to taste like traditional espresso without pushing so far that all you taste is burnt.
That's the target.
Come try it
If you're in Fort Worth, come by Bee & Brew and try Rustic Roast the way we use it every day.
We'll pull you an espresso on the lever machine so you can taste what we're trying to accomplish with the blend.
Espresso is complimentary for our walk-in visitors, and Rustic Roast is available whole bean or ground if you want to take a bag home.
Come try espresso at Bee & Brew
