When you’re creating a blend, how do you decide whether to blend the beans before or after roasting?

It really comes down to the profile and practicality. If two coffees have similar densities and their ideal roast profiles align, we’ll pre-blend them for efficiency. Post-blending involves more logistics, like weighing and mixing multiple coffees after they’ve been roasted. So, we always aim for the most efficient path, but if the flavours don’t align in a single roast, we’ll happily take the extra steps to roast them separately and blend them afterward. 

What are the pros and cons of coffee blends from both a roasting perspective and a flavour perspective?

The pro is complexity. A blend allows us to build what I like to call, a “temporal experience”—layering acidity, sweetness, and finish over time—that a single origin can’t always achieve. The con can be the temptation for roasters to hide an average coffee in a blend rather than roasting with a culinary intent. Avoiding that temptation is what separates a truly curated specialty blend from a generic one.

For an aspiring roaster or a home-brewer, do you have any tips for creating the perfect blend?

Creating a blend is much harder than you think. I once spent three months reformulating one of our blends, only for it to end up surprisingly simple. You just can’t predict harmony. Sometimes acidities fight, or flavours just won’t align. It’s a process of endless iterations.