Coffee Bean Blending Guide: How to Create Unique Pour Over & Espresso Flavors at Home

 Whenever I get tired of the coffee sitting in my jars, I like to approach those beans in a more creative way. By “reworking” them through blending, I can give familiar coffees completely new flavors and textures—essentially refreshing the entire drinking experience.

Many of you have probably guessed it already: this “creative method” is blending. By combining two or more different coffees, you can create an entirely new cup with a distinct personality. For a long time, blending was mainly associated with espresso. Back when espresso dominated the market, roasters relied on blends to ensure consistency over time. But in recent years, it’s easy to see that more and more brands—and even competition-level brewers—are using blended coffees for pour-over, cold brew, and other manual brewing methods.

The reason is simple. Blending isn’t just about consistency. As I mentioned earlier, it can also create something entirely new. A new experience might mean novel flavor combinations, or a coffee that excels across the board—a true “all-rounder.” In short, blending allows us to achieve a 1 + 1 > 2 effect and enjoy coffee in ways that a single origin sometimes can’t provide.

That said, blending isn’t as simple as throwing different beans together. A good blend requires intention. You need to think about your goal, your base coffee, and the proportions. Random combinations can easily result in a cup that falls short of expectations—or is even worse than the original base coffee on its own.

So today, I want to share how to approach coffee blending: what to pay attention to, how to think about your goals, and a few blending “recipes” I personally use.

The Purpose of Blending and Bean Selection

Since most of you reading this are buyers of roasted coffee (rather than roasters), we don’t need to worry about green-bean blending versus post-roast blending. When you decide to create a blend, I strongly recommend starting by defining your goal—what kind of cup do you want to drink? Once that’s clear, you can select suitable beans from what you already have. This approach saves money and helps you arrive at an ideal blend much more efficiently.

For pour-over blends, the goals usually fall into two categories:

1. Creating a completely new flavor profile, or

2. Building a well-rounded coffee with both excellent flavor and mouthfeel.

If your goal is the former, you’ll prioritize distinctive flavor characteristics. If it’s the latter, you’ll need to carefully balance both flavor and texture through bean choice and ratios.

If you’ve browsed my Taobao or Tmall flagship store, you may have noticed that I offer quite a few blends. In addition to espresso-focused blends, there are also blends designed specifically for pour-over and cold brew. One blend name appears across multiple categories: Strawberry Candy. While the name stays the same, the beans and roast profiles change depending on the intended brewing method.

Strawberry Candy · Geisha (For Pour-Over & Cold Brew)

The Strawberry Candy · Geisha blend is designed for flavor-driven brews like pour-over and cold brew. My goal was a cup with intense fruitiness and pronounced floral aromas. To achieve that, I blended:

• A Costa Rica Mirazu Estate honey-processed coffee with rich strawberry and mixed-berry notes, and

• A washed Geisha from Boquete, Panama, known for its elegant jasmine aroma.

The result is a blend bursting with both fruit and floral character. In the cup, you can clearly taste sweet strawberry and berry notes, elegant jasmine florals, and a refreshing oolong tea–like finish. The overall profile leans toward bright sweetness and acidity, with a smooth mouthfeel and a long, lingering aftertaste.

Strawberry Candy · Espresso

The espresso-focused version, Strawberry Candy · Espresso, is a blend I mention quite often. My goal here was different: I wanted an espresso with floral and fruity notes, low acidity, sweetness as the core flavor, and a solid, weighty mouthfeel.

To achieve this, I blended:

• A berry-forward Strawberry Candy component,

• A Colombia Huila coffee with chocolate, cookie, and caramel notes and a full body, and

• An Ethiopian heirloom variety to add aromatic complexity.

Pulled as espresso, this blend delivers flavors of strawberry, subtle florals, chocolate, and caramel. The cup is sweet, rich, and full-bodied, with a long finish. When paired with milk, it even develops a unique strawberry wafer–like flavor—an unexpectedly delightful result.

Why Goals Come First

As you can see, different goals lead to different bean choices—and even different roast levels. Compared to the pour-over blend, the espresso version uses a slightly darker roast. This helps reduce perceived acidity while enhancing body and sweetness.

By now, it should be clear why setting a goal before choosing your beans is so important.

When selecting beans for a blend, keep these two points in mind:

First: the roast levels should be similar.
Some difference is fine, but avoid extremes. Beans roasted to different levels extract at different speeds. Darker roasts have a more porous structure, so their soluble compounds are extracted more quickly. If you blend a very dark roast with a very light roast, uneven extraction becomes almost inevitable.

With high extraction efficiency, the dark roast can easily over-extract; with lower efficiency, the light roast may under-extract. This makes brewing far more difficult. Choosing beans with similar roast levels helps minimize extraction differences and makes it much easier to brew a great cup.

Beyond that, there aren’t many hard rules. Feel free to experiment. Mix coffees from different origins, processing methods, or flavor profiles, and you’ll quickly discover entirely new expressions. If you want to highlight a specific characteristic, simply increase the proportion of the bean that carries it.

Ratios and Brewing Parameters

Using Strawberry Candy · Geisha as an example again:

• If I want the floral notes to stand out more, I might use a 4:6 ratio of Costa Rica to Panama Geisha.

• If I want more fruit intensity, I might reverse it to 6:4.

Set your ratios based on your goal, then fine-tune them based on taste.

As for brewing parameters, simply base them on the average roast level of your blend. If both coffees are light-roasted, use standard light-roast parameters. If one is light and the other medium, choose a middle-ground approach. The same logic applies across the board.

A Few Personal Blending Recipes

To wrap things up, here are a couple of my personal blending combinations. If you happen to have these beans on hand, I highly recommend giving them a try—you might be surprised by the results:

• Colombia Sidra × Ethiopia Guji — 4:6

• Panama Boquete Geisha × Ethiopia Alo × Colombia Pink Bourbon — 3:5:2

Happy blending—and enjoy discovering entirely new cups of coffee. ☕