Coffee drinkers the world over have their own preferences of tastes and flavors. This is not limited only to the people of one city or country, but the tastes differ from country to country. The Italians, for example, prefer strong flavored coffee in comparison to the Americans who like milder tastes. Likewise, the people of eastern globe love to have spicy touch in their drinks. So the coffee cultivation in different parts of the world differs in order to cater to the local tastes. With the growing international trade, commodities are being exchanged from one country to another. So is the coffee. In order to satisfy each and everyone's taste, blending of coffee is done. In blending, the various coffee beans from all over the globe are collected and mixed to meet the demand of differing tastes of the coffee lovers.

Most of the gourmet coffees are either regular ones or decaffeinated. But gourmet blends give different and unique tastes to the coffee. A single type of coffee bean may give only one type of taste, blending gives the tastes of more than one type of bean. Gourmet coffee itself is made from the high quality coffee beans of that region, such as Arabica beans, gourmet blends change the very nature of these beans either by mixing or at the time of roasting. Coffee beans that are not in demand in one country are used somewhere else and processed. Semi roasting or double roasting methods is adopted for giving finer tastes to the coffee. The coffee beans imported from other places are sometimes seasoned differently by different methods. But this requires a lot of research on the part of the coffee specialists. Careful observation and lots of patience goes into producing the perfect blends.

Countries having coffee plantations as their main source of economy tend to export their produce to other countries. Such of the exchanges can be used for making blends. A small difference in blends gives the coffee an entirely different taste that the coffee drinker may not have tasted ever. Therefore drinking gourmet coffee with different blends is by one way of helping those countries improve their standard.

Blends are not restricted to one specific species of coffee beans. Even some low quality cultivations are also used. Those beans would be fresh enough for making the perfect blends though they require some special techniques for processing. Thus gourmet blends give the coffee drinkers opportunities to test various flavors of coffee beans.