As the influence of boutique coffee continues to grow, many people are no longer satisfied with drinking the milky Italian coffee or strong-tasting espresso in coffee shops. Hand-brewed coffee has become a major solution for home coffee brewing.

In your spare time or leisure life, whether you are alone or chatting with a few close friends, hand-brewed a cup of gourmet coffee is a good way to enhance the interest in life or the social atmosphere.

Hand-brewed coffee (picture from the Internet)

Coffee fans probably know that the coffee beans used for espresso are often a blend of different varieties of coffee beans, and dark roasted beans are the main ones, because dark roasted beans have a better expression of oil. The perfect combination of strong and rich coffee and fragrant milk and milk foam makes a qualified cup of cappuccino, latte or mocha.

Compared with Italian coffee, the coffee beans used in hand-brewed coffee are often medium or lightly roasted, and most of them are single-origin coffee. In fact, hand-brewed coffee can also be blended to achieve better results.

Here are a few principles for blending hand-brewed coffee beans to share with you:

1. Try to choose coffee beans with similar styles and tones for blending;

In my opinion, hand-poured blending is a process of "strengthening" rather than "complementing". It is best not to try to blend two or three beans with completely opposite styles. The effect of doing so may not be complementary, but it is very likely to result in a situation where there is no personality. For example: blending dark roasted Mandheling and slightly medium roasted washed Yirga. The actual effect is not good, and there is no main tone.

If you blend coffee beans with similar styles and tones (at least not in opposite directions), it will be relatively safer, and it will often play a role in "enhancing" the flavor of the same direction, and the personality will be more distinct. For example: blending Mandheling and Brazilian coffee. The classic Mamba blend is not only suitable for Italian, but also for hand brewing.

For example, the blend of medium-roasted Colombian coffee and slightly medium-roasted sun-dried Yirgacheffe coffee can also be very outstanding, often highlighting the base notes of floral and fruity aromas.

2. Try to use coffee beans with similar roasting degrees for blending;

Try to use coffee beans with similar roasting degrees for blending. Italian blending can be divided into cooked blending and raw blending. In the case of cooked blending, coffee beans of different roasting degrees can be mixed. However, this is not very suitable for blending hand-brewed coffee beans, as the extraction method of hand-brewed coffee is very different from that of Italian blending.

If beans of different roasting degrees are combined, it is likely to cause poor extraction and unpleasant flavors when used for hand-brewed coffee.

3. Try to limit the number of formula beans to less than three;

It is best to have two or three types of beans for hand-brewed coffee blends, no more than three; and when three types of beans are combined, the proportion of one of them must account for at least half.