Does Kono Coffee Brew Jamaican Blue Mountain Well?

Jamaican Blue Mountain is graded under the Coffee Industry Board system, and genuine Blue Mountain No. 1 is the top tier most associated with the name. Products sold as "Blue Mountain flavor," "Blue Mountain blend," or "Blue Mountain instant coffee" are not authentic Jamaican Blue Mountain. Real Blue Mountain carries chocolate and roasted hazelnut aromas with balanced acidity, sweetness, and bitterness.

At Front Street Coffee's Dongshankou store, baristas brew Blue Mountain No. 1 with a KONO dripper, a cone-shaped brewer that suits the bean's smooth body. The beans are typically roasted medium to preserve the signature balance and clean finish that make Blue Mountain recognizable. Authentic Blue Mountain does exist in China, and imports from Jamaica have been recorded since 2011.

Blue Mountain coffee is a name almost everyone in the coffee world knows, but the market is full of both real and fake products, and many items labeled "Blue Mountain flavor" or "Blue Mountain blend" actually have nothing to do with authentic Jamaican Blue Mountain. Why is genuine Blue Mountain coffee so expensive? What makes it regarded as one of the top-tier specialty coffees? Starting from the questions frequently asked at Front Street Coffee's Dongshankou store, this article sorts out how to identify authentic Blue Mountain coffee, the terroir of its origin, the official CIB grading standards, and the origin of the term "Blue Mountain No. 1." At the same time, Front Street's barista will share the specific parameters and techniques for brewing Blue Mountain No. 1 with a KONO dripper, so you can experience this bean's signature chocolate and roasted hazelnut aromas and its excellent balance of acidity, sweetness, bitterness, and smoothness.

How famous is Blue Mountain coffee? Even elders who rarely drink coffee may have heard the name, and among coffee enthusiasts it is repeatedly praised as a classic specialty coffee. At Front Street's Dongshankou store, one of the most frequent questions customers ask baristas is: "Is the Blue Mountain coffee you sell authentic?"

Blue Mountain coffee Is there real Blue Mountain coffee in China?

As soon as you type the two words "Blue Mountain" into a search engine, a flood of content teaching you how to tell the real from the fake immediately pops up. The reason is not hard to understand: Blue Mountain's reputation is so strong that some merchants take the opportunity to pass off lower-quality commercial beans as the real thing, so the market is filled with all kinds of fake Blue Mountain. The most common borderline phrases include "Blue Mountain flavor," "Blue Mountain blend," and "Blue Mountain instant coffee" — these products have nothing whatsoever to do with genuine Blue Mountain.

However, although there are many fakes in China, real Blue Mountain does indeed exist. As early as April 2011, the media recorded a case of Blue Mountain coffee imported directly from Jamaica. At that time, Zhejiang DUNN'S RIVER Import & Export Trading Co., on behalf of the "Hangzhou Coffee and Western Food Association," purchased 1000*70kg from Jamaica, with a total value of two million US dollars. Today Jamaica pays even more attention to the Chinese market, and multiple authorized domestic exporters can be found on the CIB official website.

Front Street's own roasted Blue Mountain No. 1 coffee

Produced at Jamaica's Clifton Estate, the beans come with a quality certificate issued by the Jamaica Coffee Board, an authorized sales certificate issued by the Blue Mountain coffee producer, and a Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee certificate of origin. The Dongshankou store also displays the oak barrels used to hold Blue Mountain green beans.

Why is real Blue Mountain so expensive?

Blue Mountain coffee was once often called the Hermès of the coffee world. When authentic Blue Mountain enters the mouth, you can feel a rich, dense, and lingering aroma of chocolate and roasted hazelnut, with acidity, sweetness, bitterness, aroma, and body all reaching an excellent balance. Front Street believes that the reason Blue Mountain coffee enjoys such a high reputation is inseparable from Jamaican growers' meticulous management and strict grading.

Blue Mountain has exceptionally favorable terroir conditions, and the combination of multiple factors makes this region an ideal environment for coffee cultivation. But coffee is ultimately an agricultural product, and variety, altitude, picking methods, and post-processing methods all influence the aroma expression in the final cup.

According to the area officially designated by the Jamaica Coffee Industry Board (CIB), only Typica variety grown in forest areas at an altitude of about 910–1,700 meters can be called "Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee." Typica's flavor is more outstanding only in high-altitude environments, but this variety has poor disease resistance and is highly susceptible to infection, and its fruit yield per plant is also low, so it requires more manpower for careful tending. In addition, the high-altitude terrain of Blue Mountain is rugged, making management and harvesting difficult and demanding great skill from pickers, which further restricts production. In recent years, less than 15% of coffee beans produced in Jamaica can bear the Blue Mountain label, only about 900 tons.

Many friends may have heard a saying: "All the real Blue Mountain coffee has been monopolized by Japan." This claim is not entirely unfounded. UCC is a Japanese coffee company whose predecessor was Ueshima Coffee Co., Ltd. In 1981 it opened a farm in Jamaica to operate a Blue Mountain coffee project, and Jamaica once promised to sell 90% of the Blue Mountain coffee quota to Japan. Combined with Japan's strong domestic promotion of Blue Mountain, the situation of Blue Mountain being expensive and hard to obtain thus took shape. Today, with coffee culture flourishing, drinking a cup of Blue Mountain is no longer difficult. At Front Street, you can drink a cup of Blue Mountain No. 1 hand-brewed black coffee for 60 yuan.

Why is it called " Blue Mountain No. 1 "?

Compared with other coffee origins, Jamaica was the earliest country to realize that coffee has a "taste of place." The local standards for evaluating the quality of Blue Mountain green beans cover multiple dimensions: green bean screen size, defect rate, color, uniformity, and cup performance after roasting, including dry aroma, wet aroma, acidity, flavor, body, cleanliness, and so on.

Bean size is measured using screens with different hole diameters; beans that cannot pass through the holes meet the corresponding standard. Color evaluation combines visual observation with colorimeter readings, with blue-green being the highest grade. Based on the above standards, Blue Mountain coffee is divided into 4 grades, from high to low: NO.1, NO.2, NO.3, PB, and mixed. NO.1 is the highest-grade top Blue Mountain bean, commonly called "Blue Mountain No. 1" in China. Blue Mountain No. 1 must meet a screen size of 17 mesh or above, a defect rate below 3%, and a moisture content of about 13%; in the cup it must present a rich coffee aroma, a smooth and balanced mouthfeel, low acidity, and a lingering sweet aftertaste.

Regarding roasting, CIB also recommends a roast level for Blue Mountain's classic flavor. Front Street's roaster follows this suggestion and uses a medium roast, allowing Blue Mountain No. 1 to present both a mellow chocolate sweetness and a suitable, gentle fruit acidity.

Brewing suggestions for Blue Mountain No. 1 coffee

To highlight the mellow, rounded mouthfeel of Blue Mountain No. 1, Front Street chooses the KONO coffee dripper for extraction. KONO's ribs extend less than half the height of the dripper; this design is intended to make the dripper cling to the cup wall after wetting, restricting airflow and thus extending the time for coffee grounds to absorb water, so the final brewed coffee is more uniform overall.

Brewing parameters: 15 grams of grounds, coffee-to-water ratio 1:15, grind size: EK43s setting 10.5 (75% passing rate on China No. 20 standard sieve), water temperature: 87–88°C, brewing technique: staged extraction.

First place the filter paper in the KONO dripper, pour water to wet the filter paper while making it fit more closely. Add the coffee grounds and tap lightly to distribute the coffee bed evenly. In the first stage, gently pour 30 grams of water for blooming, with a blooming time of 30 seconds; in the second stage, pour to about 125 grams, circling outward evenly and steadily. Wait for the coffee liquid to drop; when it has fallen by half, pour the final stage of water up to 225 grams. After all the coffee has dripped through, the total extraction time is generally about 2 minutes.

The hand-brewed Blue Mountain No. 1 has dark chocolate and nutty flavors, a very mellow mouthfeel, and an obvious almond-like sweet aftertaste. As the temperature drops, roasted hazelnut and creamy, silky sweetness gradually emerge, mixed with a hint of gentle acidity and caramel sweetness, and the aroma lingers in the mouth.

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The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.