For the last 30 years or so, specialty coffee has been trying to “unblend” coffee. This effort was a response to most of coffee’s history where blended coffee was all one could buy in most places. Coffee was marketed by roast and generic flavors of the brand as opposed to actually talking about where the coffee came from and how it was grown and processed. What is known as the second wave of specialty coffee got consumers to at least care about the country of origin. Having a coffee bag say “Ethiopia” or “Sumatra” on it and being able to attribute flavors to those countries was a revelation to many consumers. Many of those roasts, however, were dark and the flavors not nearly as distinct as they could have been back then but it started to point toward the idea that coffee was an agricultural product similar to wine. You could taste differences in the variety and the unique attributes of where it was grown and how it was handled.
This effort continued further into what many call the “third wave” where the traceability funneled down to the producer level…i.e. the farmer. It’s now commonplace to find single-variety lots from certain plots of a farm and we can tell you the exact processing method used in order to achieve the flavors that end up in your cup. Part of this is for quality and flavor but another part is about making coffee farming a more sustainable effort for farmers around the globe. Producing great coffee is incredibly difficult to achieve and it is very hard work no matter if you actually achieved that quality or not.
I applaud all of these efforts. I think they are wonderful and it is mostly what Morningsong is committed to doing. HOWEVER…I think there is something being lost in this endeavor. Somewhere along the way, “blend” became a bad word. Truth be told, it’s not an unearned reputation. For many years and still now, many blends have all too often been made up of 1) old coffee that needs to get used 2) coffees that didn’t land well and need a place to go or 3) excess coffee that needs a home. These are all legitimate concerns for a coffee roaster but they don’t lend toward blends having a good name.
On top of this, the pursuit of the “tasting note” has been paramount in specialty coffee. It is understandable as specialty coffee has long held the upstart role in the industry and been in the position of trying to defend its right to exist so all of the efforts just mentioned have to be for a reason, right? If you pay triple the going rate for a bag of coffee and it doesn’t taste like the orange blossom listed on the bag, what are we even doing? Coffee competitions should take some of the blame as well. Barista competitions are partly judged on whether certain tasting note calls are accurate or not. I say this as someone who has and still does strive to produce the finest single-origin coffees in the world and who puts tasting notes on my bags. That pursuit is not wrong but it is misguided in my view if we eschew blends altogether in that endeavor. I think we can take all that we’ve learned about sourcing, roasting, and brewing to make blends that will be even better than the sum of their parts.
Let me also say that this is not just based on theory or hopes. I’ve tasted many blends that are better than any of the components that are in them on their own. As someone who cups coffee for a living to buy the best coffees for my menu, most of my memorable taste experiences tend to be single-origin coffees because that is how I first come in contact with them and it is usually tied with some excitement when I find a coffee worthy of bringing in. That being said, some of the best cups of brewed coffee I’ve had have actually been blends. The most notable, and the one that convinced me that blends were great, was an equal-parts blend of a Kenyan coffee and two washed Ethiopian coffees. The body and sweetness of the Kenya filled in the gaps of the tea-like Ethiopian coffees that lent floral/citrus complexity the Kenyan coffee lacked. The coffee was sweet upfront, complex throughout, and had a long, clean finish. Yes, all of the components on their own were great coffees, but together they made a truly sublime cup.
One concern about blending coffee is that each coffee requires a very specific dose and grind setting in order to taste its best and bring out all of its flavor characteristics. This is a valid concern and one reason why not all coffees are ideal to blend together even if they are good coffees. For a blend to work well, the coffees need to be extracted at a somewhat similar rate. One factor in this is roasting. If two similar coffees are roasted differently, they will extract at different rates and you will get uneven results in the cup. Another variable is the process level of the coffees. If one part of a blend is a natural and another is a lightly roasted washed coffee, they will extract at different rates in most cases.
These are all justified concerns but there are some counterpoints as well. One is that some coffees don’t extract ideally on their own and so less-than-ideal measures have to be taken even when it is a single-origin coffee. For example…lightly-roasted washed Ethiopian coffees create more fines and so the drawdown time in a brew takes longer. In order to combat this, you are forced to go coarser than might be ideal so that the brew doesn’t go too long. Yes, you could go to the extreme and filter out the fines but that is time consuming and not practical for most people or in a cafe setting. In this case, blending it with another coffee that doesn’t produce as many fines may actually be a helpful thing.
Most people are not brewing coffee in the most precise way possible or with the best equipment, water, and recipe so most of these concerns don’t apply anyway. In these cases, a blend of two really good coffees that are similar enough in solubility and roast level will give them a more complex and complete cup than if they were just brewing one of them.
For these reasons, we’ve decided to bring some love and respect back to blends starting with the first iteration of Kismet. The word “kismet” means “fortuitous” or “meant to be.” When we have a couple coffees in our roastery that marry well together and create a beautiful cup, we think that’s a pretty fortunate event and one that we want to offer to our customers. We test out blends we think might work during cupping and brew trials to see if we’ve got a match worth sharing. If we don’t have any coffees that fit the bill, we just won’t have Kismet on the menu. We may also have multiple, in which case we’ll number them accordingly. Each Kismet blend has the year and then the chronological number of what Kismet blend it was that year. So, the inaugural Kismet is Kismet 26-1 and it is a 50/50 blend of Halo Beriti (washed Ethiopia) and Kangurumai (washed Kenya) and we think it’s pretty stunning. The next one this year will be 26-2 and the first one of 2027 will be 27-1. We are also putting the names of each coffee and their tasting notes on the label as well.
Even if you are the most scientific and precise with your brewing, we think you’ll find Kismet to be an impeccable cup. Give it a shot and let us know what you think of it. Any new tasting note recommendations are welcome.
