The standard blending strategy in Northern Italy for straight espresso is to start with a medium to light roasted, sweet and boring Brazil, then add strongly flavored coffees in small amounts. The final blend would usually end up as 50% to 75% Brazil and 25% to 50% WP Centrals, Africans, and more recently, Indian coffees.

The standard strategy for Northwestern, Peet's lineage roasters, blending for milk drinks, seems to be to start with a bitter-sweet, medium to dark roasted Indonesia/Guatemala combo and add Ethiopian beans for fruit, and Brazilian ones for crema.

I once ran across some offering sheets of Salerno based coffee importers, and they seemed to be half way between Seattle and Trieste on blending strategies.

The simplest is to have a coffee that seems to shout "SO me," and if it's not quite balanced on its own as a shot, add around 30% to 40% of whatever will balance the taste. While very few coffees work perfectly as SOs, lots work as "SOs with garnish."

For all creative work, not just for coffee blends, you need to be able to tell your audience what the point of the exercise is before asking for reviews -- unless, of course, you like being romantic, misunderstood and alone.

Hi Ed, you're right that the big money is in mass markets -- for food, for fibers, for coffee. And by definition, the mass market is stuff for the majority of people who don't give a crap about what it is they are buying (everyone's is serious about something, but that means they aren't serious about most things). The whole rigmarole of market research, advertising etc is about selling to people who don't give an eff.

But I'm not sure how that affects your blend selection. This is the home roasting forum - so put together something you like. Once you have that, send it out and tell us why you like it. With luck, we'll be able to give some help on the tweaks. My previous post was motivated by a worry that you were looking to create a "blend by committee."