MAKE YOUR MARK

Creating a successful signature blend

IT’S CALLED MANY THINGS by many people: house blend. Signature blend. Roast master’s blend. It’s known by names like Black Cat and Hair Bender and Dancing Goats. But whatever you call it, the meaning is the same: it’s that one special blend that gives your roastery an identity above all others. It’s the one that customers ask for, by name or by flavor, and it is your chance to show your company’s coffee prowess.
     Creating and marketing a successful and enduring signature blend is a complicated, but necessary, part of any roasting business. Unlike other blends, which may come and go over the years or which may only appeal to certain customers, a signature blend must not only be high-quality, repeatable and consistent through the years, it must also be accessible to a wide number of your customers. Ideally, your blend will also have marketability, something that sets it apart and makes your customers take notice, take a sip and then take out their wallets, time and time again.

How Now, Signature Blend?

What makes a signature blend, and how a signature blend comes into being, varies almost as much as what it’s called. Some roasteries set out to design their signature blend from the get-go. Others start with several blends, and then make the most popular into their signature blend.
     “Our house blend is about 13 or 14 years old,” says David Rier, roastmaster for Thomas Hammer Coffee Roasters. “It was created by the owner, Thomas, who picked out his favorite coffees and blended them together to make what he thought of as his favorite blend.”
     Over time, that blend became the company’s signature espresso blend—the taste profile of which has stayed the same since its inception—and now it is the coffee that is sold as espresso in the company’s 12 retail stores, as well as to its wholesale customers.
     For those who are planning to create a signature blend, it helps to have your end goal in mind before you start, suggests Richard Serpe, master roaster for Coffee Roasters of Las Vegas. “The first thing to do is to honestly understand what you’re trying to do and what you want to accomplish,” he says. “Once you have that down, you try to make something that’s compatible. I always make a blend in my mind first and I know the tastes of the individual coffees, so it helps me start, because I can imagine what they’ll taste like when we blend them together.”
     For Andy Newbom, chief espresso officer for Barefoot Coffee Roasters, Inc., a signature blend is also something to plan and craft with the utmost care. “I think a roaster should develop any blend carefully, but in particular a signature blend, because it gives the roaster something to hang their hat on,” he says. “We wanted our signature blend to reflect the quintessential Barefoot experience.”
     Newbom suggests that roasters begin by deciding what they want their blend to taste like, what they want it to represent and how they want it to be served. “You can’t design a blend in a vacuum,” he says. “Make sure that you know how it’s going to be prepared, whether it’s drip or espresso. All of those things make a difference.”
     For the company’s signature blend, called Element 114 (after an unnamed element on the periodic table), Newbom had a desired flavor profile in mind. After about a month of roasting single-origin coffees and pulling shots, he started blending them. It took months before he had the five-bean, four-roast-level blend he wanted.
     It wasn’t just flavor that Newbom was looking for when creating the company’s signature blend. He was also trying to create a blend that would give the best cup for Barefoot’s customers. “We created a blend that is very forgiving and not as easy to screw up, so it’s easier to hit for most users.” Not only does the blend have few sour notes and a broad temperature range, it also has a wide range of shot times. “It has a five- to seven-second window,” Newbom says. “Overall, it’s easier to be more consistent with.”

A Blend by Any Other Name

To make this article easier to read, we picked the term “signature blend” to describe the type of “branding blend” that we’re talking about. But does it really matter what you call it?
     “I think it’s important to brand it and give it a name,” says Tommy Thwaites, president of Coda Coffee Company. “A lot of roasters just call it a house blend, but from the consumers’ standpoint, it’s really easy for them to switch from one house blend to another without even realizing the difference. Branding it with a name locks them in.”
     Thwaites’ signature blend is called Harmony, a name that’s in line with Coda’s music theme and, he hopes, a memorable name for a coffee. “Coda is an Italian word that means final movement in music, and we’re the final movement to a meal for our customers,” he says. “And we figured that Harmony said everything we wanted to say about a blend.”
     Ron Vaccarello, owner of Crescent Moon Coffee Roasters, felt it was important to give his company’s blend a name that would not only be memorable, but useful to customers as well. Thus, the creation of Morning Blend. “It was a blend that was designed specifically for the purpose of drinking it in the morning,” he says.
     In fact, Vaccarello takes the name so seriously that he won’t allow Morning Blend to be served at any other time. “We don’t serve it after 11 o’clock,” he says. “We just refuse to. It’s a good opportunity to introduce customers to other coffees anyway.”
Of course, he admits, “we’ve got customers who sell it wholesale, and I can’t put a gun to their heads and say, ‘you can’t serve it after morning,’ but we do explain to them that it’s really designed to be savored in the early part of the day.”
     However you use it, the language of coffee is important. As the awareness of customers continues to grow, so will their understanding of the language surrounding words like signature and even blend. “Language has a ton of pre-conceptions mixed into it, so we never use the word blend,” says Newbom. “We usually call them mixes, because we put our coffees together after we roast them, so to us it’s really more of a mix than a blend.”

In for the Long Haul

The most successful signature blends are those that are maintained consistently over a number of years despite changes in coffee availability, cup profile and price. Customers perceive your blend in a very specific way, with a very specific taste profile, and it must hit it perfectly every time. Because your customers have come to expect something particular from your signature coffee, everything points to making things predictable and repeatable with a signature blend—you can’t afford for your signature to be inconsistent.
     With this in mind, it makes sense to begin with core components that you can buy fresh, or at least receive fresh deliveries of throughout the year. If this isn’t an option, you should consider ahead of time which coffees, if any, can be substituted at different times of the year in order to keep your blend at its freshest.
     Vaccarello describes an issue common to many roasters. “We choose our single-origin coffees first,” he says. “And then from those coffees that we feel are up to our level for single origins, we create our blend.” If a single-origin coffee isn’t as good as it was last year, then they have to find another coffee that will sell not only as a single-origin, but that will also replace the missing blend component. “We try to design the blends so you can possibly switch out the coffees and still have a consistent and high-quality profile.”
     And it isn’t just that coffee quality, cost and taste profiles change from year to year. There is always the chance that what you bought last year is no longer available. “Price has never been an issue for us,” says Rier. “Availability might be though. Hopefully, you always have enough coffee booked forward from this point on. Even if you don’t have it for anything else, you should have it for your house blend.”
     One resource that’s often overlooked in the consistency chain is brokers. If a specific coffee that you use is not available or is not up to par, they may have suggestions for a temporary option. They can also help you work toward long-term relationships with growers, which will aid you in future supply and price security.
     “If you have a good relationship with your exporter, he knows what you want,” Rier says. “A lot of times, our exporter will say, ‘I’m going to send you three or four others that might fit better with what you want to do.’”
     While consistency and repeatability are key components to the longevity of your successful signature blend, it is also important to allow your blends to develop into maturity over the years. Small things contribute to important refinements, such as upgrading your green beans or advancing your roasting techniques. Success can be found in the balance you achieve between consistency and continual improvement.
     “Of course, you want to be consistent, but no one is one hundred percent consistent, so we let things evolve,” says Thwaites. “We make very subtle changes over the years, because we might be able to do it better. Don’t be afraid to change and let things evolve, because you’re always learning.”

Staying at the Top

After having a signature blend for one, two or even 20 years, how can you be sure that it’s still not only consistent after all this time, but that it’s the quality you want it to be? After all, this is the coffee that your company will be known for, the one against which all others will be compared.
     Cupping seems like the obvious answer. And it’s definitely part of the equation. But cupping alone isn’t enough—it’s just as important to make sure you’re tasting your blend as you expect it to be served. “We cup our coffee all the time, but we also pull shots with it,” says Rier. “A blend might be great in a cupping or as a drip, but if it’s an espresso blend, you want to be tasting it in that application, just as your customers will be.”
     Relying on your customers’ feedback is another great way to make sure your blend is staying at the top of the game. And don’t just wait for them to come to you when something goes wrong—solicit feedback during deliveries, trainings and via e-mail. If possible, try to get feedback from the coffee industry as well, from SCAA trainings, barista competitions or private consultations.
     And don’t overlook your company, suggests Rier. “We rely on our stores, and on our employees, as well as our customers to make sure that the flavor is where it should be,” he says.
     Last, but not least, taste your competitors’ coffees to remind yourself what makes your own blend unique and appealing to your customers.
     Whether you decide to call this coffee your house blend, your signature blend, your special mix or some other wonderfully creative name that you’ve come up with, it’s important to remember that this is the blend that will define your company, not just for today but for years to come. So choose the best coffees you can, roast and blend them to your version of perfection, and repeat the process day after day after day. No one said it would be easy to make your mark with a successful house blend—but once you’ve mastered it, your customers are sure to love you for it.

IN 1988, SCOTT MERLE was a barista at The Dancing Goats Espresso Company in downtown Olympia, Wash., where he helped develop a pretty tasty house blend. He spends his time now as Batdorf & Bronson’s coffee buyer, working hard not to screw up that same blend.