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What isSOE coffee?

SOE is the abbreviation of Single Origin Espresso, which means single-origin espresso. Its focus is to highlight the coffee flavor of a specific origin—put simply, it means using single-origin coffee beans to make espresso.

In contrast, there are espresso blend coffee beans. Front Street has also emphasized many times that blended coffee beans are a balance between flavor, consistency, and price—that is, if you want both flavor and consistency, the price will be high; while prioritizing price and consistency requires sacrificing flavor.

But SOE is different. First, let's understand its background. SOE only began to rise in recent years. Single-origin coffee beans used in pour-over can express a variety of flavors characteristic of their origins, and with the diversification of information media in recent years, information about world barista competitions using single-origin coffee beans has spread widely. Applying single-origin coffee beans to espresso is also the trend.

Is SOE coffee specialty coffee?

In fact, this question is equivalent to asking: is single-origin coffee specialty coffee? The answer is: not entirely equivalent. When the concept of specialty coffee was first proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, yield was the primary goal at that time. Coffee beans were collected and processed centrally by origin and exported in the name of the country to earn foreign exchange. Imagine coffee beans of varying quality mixed together—if there were no obvious negative flavors, that was already fortunate.

Back then, Ms. Erna Knutsen proposed that specialty coffee is "coffee beans cultivated with flavors unique to their origin under the distinctive microclimate and geographical conditions of a producing region." The essential meaning is that good coffee should not be mixed into large batches of commodity beans, but should stand apart. It was intended to distinguish it from the bulk commercial coffee traded on the New York futures market.

Therefore, specialty coffee beans require good varieties, a good environment, and careful cultivation to produce high-quality, good-tasting coffee beans, while single-origin coffee beans simply refer to coffee beans from a single origin that form flavors characteristic of that origin. There is no quality requirement—for example, Indonesia Lintong Mandheling G2 is a single-origin coffee bean, but it is not necessarily a specialty coffee bean (specifically, it still depends on the cupping score). Of course, the single-origin coffee we drink in coffee shops is almost 100% specialty coffee beans.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of SOE coffee?

Since its birth, SOE has been labeled as coffee with good flavors from its origin, which means the quality of the coffee beans selected must be guaranteed. How can the advantages of SOE coffee be highlighted? Of course, the flavor must be prominent—the kind that catches your eye. This means good beans alone are not enough; suitable roasting is also needed.

For espresso blends, in order to satisfy consistency and make up for insufficient coffee bean quality, the roast level is deepened, and the flavor becomes stable. But for SOE coffee to show a striking flavor, it cannot be like blends, nor can it directly use lightly roasted single-origin coffee beans intended for pour-over to make SOE—if roasted too light, the extracted espresso will be extremely sour and astringent. Therefore, SOE roasting requires a unique profile.

Making delicious SOE is not simply a matter of choosing a single-origin coffee bean of good quality; it requires countless roasting experiments and extraction adjustments before there is a chance to achieve the ideal result (sometimes after several roasts and extractions, it is found that the bean is not suitable for making espresso). Espresso can amplify the flavor of a single-origin coffee bean, but it will also amplify the bean's defects—for example, some coffee beans with good flavor may be lacking in body. Therefore, in some shops that offer SOE, only 1-2 SOE coffee beans can be found.

Of course, a latte or Americano made with SOE will have a flavor that blends cannot match. For example, an Americano made with Yirgacheffe SOE can clearly taste notes of citrus, floral, and honey, and the lingering aroma in the cup after drinking is especially obvious—something that some bitterness-focused blends cannot achieve.

Is SOE better than blended coffee beans?

A fairly common phenomenon on the market is that blends are mostly made to achieve price advantages and flavor consistency, so their flavor will not be too good, while SOE is originally meant to distinguish itself from this type of blend and show a memorable taste, so flavor is given priority, and of course the price will also be higher.

But this common phenomenon does not prove that SOE is completely superior to blends. When Front Street was developing the Sunflower Warm Sun blend, we also once thought about making a Sherry SOE coffee bean. When tasting it, it showed plenty of winey notes but lacked sweetness and body. So we thought of adding Yirgacheffe Red Cherry Project to increase the sweetness. Finally, through testing different ratios, we confirmed 60% Sherry and 40% Yirgacheffe. This blend had a better flavor than the Sherry SOE.

In short, the emergence of SOE also represents increasingly high quality requirements for espresso coffee beans, and overall it is beneficial to the development of espresso coffee.

What should be noted when making SOE?

For SOE single-origin espresso, in order to highlight the flavor of the origin, the coffee beans selected are generally not roasted too dark. Compared with traditional darker-roasted espresso coffee beans, the flavor is more difficult to extract.

So on one hand, extraction parameters need to be adjusted to increase the extraction yield. For example, extending the extraction time, making the grind finer, increasing the dose, etc.

On the other hand, when serving espresso drinks based on SOE, the ratio of espresso to milk or water needs to be adjusted. Reduce the milk or water to highlight the coffee's taste, so that the coffee does not become too weak.

Finally, there are also very strict requirements for choosing beans to make SOE. Although SOE performs prominently, because it comes from a single origin, its shortcomings are relatively easy to amplify, so factors such as roasting and particle size will all affect the flavor.

If you do not have high-quality coffee beans, then the SOE coffee you make will not taste good, and there is not even a way to hide it. So in actual practice, SOE coffee has very high technical requirements in all aspects, which is also one of the reasons SOE coffee is usually more expensive than regular espresso.

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