It’s Blend Month!

Since starting Driftaway,  we’ve offered our main flavor profiles as single origin coffees, so that we can easily communicate the taste and terroir of coffee regions from around the world. 

For coffees roasting in September 2021, we’re shaking things up a bit, and are excited to share a different approach: profiles as blends! 

Instead of picking a single coffee that comes as close as possible to each flavor profile, we’re blending different coffees together – some are familiar favorites, like the Nicaragua Dipilto Finca Un Regalo de Dios, and some are brand new.

These coffees come together to be the best Fruity, Classic, Balanced or Bold flavor profiles that we can imagine. Here’s what we look for in each profile: 

Fruity: Light roast. We choose coffees that have higher acidity, lots of fruit flavors, and sometimes floral notes.

Classic: Medium roast. For this profile, we look for a “regular cup of coffee” taste: mild sweetness, chocolatey or nutty base notes, and lower acidity.

Balanced: Light-Medium roast. This profile has elements of both Fruity and Classic: some fruit or floral qualities, a medium acidity, but caramelized sugar or chocolatey bass notes to balance out those juicy top notes. 

Bold: Medium-Dark roast. We want the Bold profile to lean heavier on flavors of roast, and less so on flavors of origin, although there are still some that peek through. This profile has extremely low, or non-existent acidity. 

To build each profile as a blend, we picked from some of our favorite lots and brainstormed at the cupping table to develop final blends for each profile. Each coffee that we chose had to lend its strength to serve a function in the blend, such as adding brightness, or body, or complexity, or sweetness. 

If there was a flavor we were missing, we found new coffees to feature – like the Guatemala Cobán for the Balanced profile, grown on Finca Santa Isabel by Luis Valdes and his son, Luis “Wicho” Valdes. We chose this coffee for its crisp acidity, which combines with the rest of the coffees in this blend to create a perfect balance: combined with the fruity Kenya Kirinyaga it adds an even juicier top note for the blend. We added a dash of the Nicaragua Dipilto Regalo de Dios for a floral perfume, and finally the Ecuador Pinchincha for a sweet, sugary base note. 

This process takes a lot of planning and roasting work to pull off. It’s been a super fun process for our roasting and quality control team to meet up and taste so many different coffees, and come up with several different combinations of all of them.

We hope you like the results!