Decisions, decisions! As if choosing a commercial coffee machine wasn’t hard enough, now you have the next dilemma – which coffee should you serve?

By comparison to choosing the coffee, deciding on the machine might seem the easy part. With commercial coffee machines, after all, you have only a certain number of options. But when it comes to selecting the right coffee for your customers, you face the greatest variable of all – personal taste.

Your choice of coffee might be dependant on the profile of your typical customer. People’s coffee tastes vary and might be influenced by their nationality or even their culture.

Why do coffee flavours vary?

Coffee beans are grown in many different parts of the world. Each variety has its own flavour and characteristics. These are influenced by the different soils and climates. For example, Kenyan coffee has an aromatic full flavour with a strong acidity element and citric tones. Puerto Rican coffee is rich, full bodied but only has a slightly acidity level. It is almost fruity. Indian coffee is strong and aromatic, but with very low levels of acidity.

Today’s commercial coffee machines, although very simple to use, are very sophisticated yet each machine brews the coffee in the same way. They use espresso as the basis for all the other types of beverages as we explained in an earlier blog about different coffee drinks.

However similar commercial coffee machines might be, it’s the type of coffee you use that makes the big difference to the end result. For example, if you have a WMF 1200F filter coffee machine, a single origin bean such as a pure Columbian, lightly or medium roasted, will give you great results.

Espresso coffee traditionally uses a darker or higher roast and a blend of different beans. A mix of EL Salvador and Ethopian Robusta beans works well. The weather, growing conditions and the actual coffee bean harvest can affect the flavour, but using a blend allows you to make adjustments to compensate, and helps you achieve a consistent taste.

It is important to test your possible coffees in your chosen coffee machine to ensure consistently good results … and that’s where WMF comes in.

Profiling the beans for your professional coffee machine

You can arrange to meet up with your WMF Area Sales Manager who will arrange for you test or ‘profile’ your chosen coffees in your selected machine. They will trial the different settings so you can be sure of giving your customers the perfect coffee experience. And once you have the perfect brew, the settings will be stored on a USB memory stick ready to be transferred to your own commercial coffee machines. If you change or upgrade your machine, these settings can simply be transferred making any changes simple and less time-consuming.

When it comes to personal tastes and opinions, as the old adage goes, ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time’. But if you do your homework and test your coffees thoroughly, and take advantage of WMF’s skills and expertise you can be sure you will be delivering consistently good quality coffee that people will come back for!