Sorry for confusing English.

Hello. I like to blend and roast coffee beans by myself, and I have been doing for 3-4 months. I used to get coffee beans online, and I was initially getting from large Italian coffee roasters like Lavazza, and switched to couple other roasters like Red Bird Coffee. But I could't find any taste difference between those beans that I bought. They all tasted kind of the same. So I decided to visit some caffe to compare taste difference from each caffe. And guess what? There was a significant difference from each espresso that each caffe made. One tasted like nutty, other one was like fruity with a good body to it, and some got chocolatey taste. I was quite shocked how they can be so different. I bought one of their original blend and tried it home with my moka pot, and it tasted the same way as the one I drunk at the caffe. I remember that it was really light roast but got really good body and sweetness, and no charcoalish flavor that I often experienced from dark roasted coffee. Since then, I decided to do my own blend to achieve the taste that I want. But every time I experiment with different blend, I get kind of the same taste result. I even tried similar blend to the one I bought from the caffe, but it was not even close to what I experienced from the caffe's blend. Why is that? Why do my blends taste the same where the blend that I bought from the caffe taste significantly different?

Were the ones you tried and bought at the cafe actually blends? I ask because some blends are made to taste like generic coffee the masses know, aka them tasting the same. You might have also stumbled upon a place with innovative blends but I can't tell as you didn't give specifics. Dark matter coffee for instance has outstanding blends that ate usually light roasted and bursting with strange and interesting flavors. Whereas redbird is a one or two taste comfort blend, and many people prefer this.

What exactly have you tried blending?

What are you brewing the blends in? Mokka pot ?

brianl wrote:Were the ones you tried and bought at the cafe actually blends? I ask because some blends are made to taste like generic coffee the masses know, aka them tasting the same. You might have also stumbled upon a place with innovative blends but I can't tell as you didn't give specifics. Dark matter coffee for instance has outstanding blends that ate usually light roasted and bursting with strange and interesting flavors. Whereas redbird is a one or two taste comfort blend, and many people prefer this.

What exactly have you tried blending?

Mrboots2u wrote:What are you brewing the blends in? Mokka pot ?

Hi, thank you for your reply! So I tried to blend couple different type in this 3-4 months. First I tried the one that was on Sweet Maria's Coffee, and it was one of his espresso blends. I used 50% of Natural Brazil, 25% from each Sumatran's and Ethiopian's. It was described as non sweet, and more aggressive and chocolatey blend. I blended them first and roast them into couple different roast levels. But I kind of felt the same taste as when I had been using Red Bird Espresso, or Lavazza. The only taste difference that I could tell was the taste from different roast level. When it was dark roasted, charcoalish, and when it was light, more like watery. So I decided to buy coffee beans from my local coffee roaster, and he had his original blend that contained Natural and Pulped Natural Brazil, and Kenyan (not sure about percentage). I tried it on my Moka pot (becauese I don't own espresso machine, I usually brew on Moka pot), and it came out as not really concentrated since it was lightly roasted, but when I tasted, I was surprised because I have never experienced coffee from moka pot that has great body, sweetness, clean, and some other mysterious taste. Inspired by the blend, I decided to do the same blend without pulped natural brazil (I could not find one). So it was basically 60% of natural Brazil and 40% of Kenya. This time, I roasted two of them differently. I roasted Kenya for City roast, and Brazil for Full City. I tried it with my Moka pot, but it had not much difference from the blend that I did before and was not even close to the local roaster's blend. I knew it was missing pulped natural brazil, but does it give a blend such a significant difference? I am really curious how the local roaster's blend gave me such a great experience, where my own taste boring every time.

You mention that you do the roasting, I would suggest that this is the process you should try to improve. If not done right, you can easily bake great beans and remove a lot of the interesting flavors. Check out the roasting forum for more info.

thank you for your suggestion! I will go check out the roasting forum and see if I had been doing anything wrong :)