As the specialty coffee scene in China grows ever more vibrant, high-quality single-origin beans from around the world are appearing on the menus of many cafés with increasing frequency. Not only does each coffee come with detailed traceability information, but many single-origin lots also leave a lasting impression with their distinctive aromas. Front Street's own bean list, for example, takes up an entire large blackboard, densely listing nearly 50 products—from fruity and bright to sweet and bitter, from light and refreshing to rich and intense, there's something for everyone.

In the past, when people made espresso, they typically had only a few simple blends to choose from, most of them dark-roasted, producing coffee with a relatively intense mouthfeel and rather one-dimensional flavors. Nowadays, with so many more bean varieties available, many coffee lovers say they want to try making SOE with single-origin beans, hoping to pull a shot of espresso with truly distinctive character.

What Is SOE?

Let's go over it one more time—SOE stands for Single Origin Espresso, which translates to "espresso made from single-origin coffee beans." The key lies in the words "single origin."

To put it simply: when you pull a shot of espresso using Front Street's Yirgacheffe everyday beans at 25 yuan, it's called a "Yirgacheffe SOE." When you make an Americano with Front Street Blue Mountain No. 1 beans at 158 yuan, that's a "Blue Mountain SOE Americano." And if your wallet is feeling particularly generous and you pick up a bag of Front Street's top-priced Emerald Red Label Geisha to make a latte, that milk coffee can be called a "Red Label Geisha SOE Latte."

What Coffee Beans Should You Choose for Making SOE?

We need to understand that whether you use a blend or a single-origin bean, it will ultimately go through the high temperature, high pressure, and fine-grind extraction conditions of an espresso machine, with hot water penetrating the coffee puck in just a matter of tens of seconds and becoming espresso. This means the coffee bean's own flavors get amplified exponentially throughout the entire extraction process.

The most common scenario is this: when you use a single-origin bean that's too lightly roasted, the espresso's acidity spikes dramatically while the aroma falls flat; when you extract with a bean that's too darkly roasted, the espresso is left with nothing but bitterness and char, with no distinctive character to speak of. So to make a delicious SOE, choosing the right coffee bean is absolutely the first prerequisite. Based on Front Street's experience, we can start from three aspects—the bean's growing region, roast level, and processing method—to more quickly identify the type of SOE that suits us.

If you enjoy a fresh, sweet-and-tart flavor profile, you might want to focus first on natural-process single-origins from African growing regions. Ethiopia's Sidamo, Yirgacheffe, and Guji, for example, are some of the most representative single-origin regions on the market today, with brewed coffee typically showing high sweetness and rich fruit and floral notes. However, since these beans are mostly used for pour-over, cold brew, and Clever Dripper, they're usually roasted to a light or medium-light level. If applied directly to espresso, you'll easily end up with under-extraction, sputtering, and thin crema.

To address this, for customers who love Ethiopian regions and want to make SOE, Front Street specifically selected three natural-process single-origin coffees and developed a separate espresso roast profile for each, launching the Flower Kui SOE, Chaka SOE, and Red Cherry SOE coffee beans respectively.

If you prefer espresso with rich fruity aromas and a round, mellow sweetness, then high-altitude beans from some Central and South American countries might be your cup of tea. Coffees from Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Peru, and other such countries are typically roasted to a medium level to bring out the sweet, aromatic character and caramel notes of their origin/variety, making them compatible with a variety of extraction methods.

Also, if you want to maximize the fruity aromas in your SOE coffee, consider single-origin beans processed with natural, honey, or anaerobic natural methods. For example, Front Street's Colombia Sidra uses double anaerobic natural processing, and the resulting SOE Americano carries distinct notes of blueberry juice, passion fruit, and ripe grapes. Another SOE latte made from Colombia Anaerobic Natural Ombligon features aromas of orange, nuts, and milk candy.

If none of the single-origins mentioned above are your type, or if you're not particularly fond of acidic coffee, then you might look to single-origins from Asia and South America—ideally those roasted to a medium to dark range. For instance, espresso made with Front Street's Brazil Cerrado and Colombia Reina Estate beans delivers a profile that's low in acidity, not bitter, and well-balanced.

How Do You Make a Delicious SOE Coffee?

Actually, making a delicious SOE isn't difficult—it's just like dialing in espresso as usual. The first step in making SOE is still to apply the basic formula of a 1:2 coffee-to-liquid ratio, keeping the time within 25 to 35 seconds, with the grind size determined by whether the flow rate falls within that time range.

For example, Front Street uses 20g of Flower Kui SOE coffee grounds to extract 40g of espresso (18g of grounds corresponds to 36g of espresso). If the time falls well short of 25 seconds, the grind is too coarse and needs to be made finer; if the espresso finishes flowing in around 30 seconds, that means the grind size is roughly on point and there's no need to change the setting.

Since SOE is ultimately used to make milk-based and flavored drinks like Americanos, lattes, and flat whites, once the espresso is dialed in, we should make some slight adjustments to the extraction plan in advance based on the SOE's own flavor profile.

If you're using a medium or medium-light roasted Ethiopian coffee with a fresh profile of floral notes, bright fruit acidity, and berries, the resulting espresso tends to have thin or even no crema. In this case, we can compensate by adding 0.3 to 0.5g more grounds to make up for the aromatic compounds in the coffee. For example, Front Street uses 20.5g of Flower Kui SOE grounds extracted over 31 seconds for 40g of espresso as the base. The resulting Americano shows a crisp, sweet-and-tart mouthfeel, and the latte's coffee intensity is also boosted, allowing you to better appreciate the aromas of espresso combined with milk.

When we make SOE with a fruity single-origin that also carries some fermented flavors, the espresso will naturally have a rich sweet-and-tart profile. If you want your SOE Americano to present abundant aromas, try increasing the espresso yield by 3 to 5g—this can make the coffee sweeter with a longer finish. If you're making an SOE latte and want to highlight the single-origin's aroma, simply reduce the amount of milk. Suppose you originally used 200g of fresh milk; you can reduce it to 160 to 180g.

The last common scenario is when using a medium-dark roasted single-origin, and the SOE shows harsh flavors like tire, hay, smoke, or charcoal. This indicates the espresso has most likely been over-extracted, which is why the resulting Americano or latte is so hard to drink. The fix is simple: reduce the espresso yield by 3 to 5g, and you can effectively eliminate the defective finish.

But if your coffee has a faint aroma, a short finish, and pronounced acidity, that means the SOE may be under-extracted. You'll need to grind slightly finer and extend the extraction time by 2 to 3 seconds to ensure the coffee's strength is just right.

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