Why our blend is 80% coffee and 20% chicory

Read the back of a Vensons pack and you will find the same ratio we have used for decades: 80% coffee, 20% chicory. People sometimes assume the chicory is there to make the coffee go further. It is not.

What chicory actually does

Chicory root is roasted and ground much like coffee, but it behaves differently in water. It is more soluble, so it releases quickly and early, and it carries almost no caffeine.

Three things follow from that:

• Body. Chicory thickens the decoction. Without it, filter coffee drips out thin and disappears under milk.
• Colour. It gives the cup its deep mahogany tone rather than a washed-out brown.
• Flow. Because it swells slightly, chicory helps the coffee bed hold together in the upper chamber so the water moves through evenly.

There is a fourth reason, which is simply taste. Chicory brings a faint caramel bitterness that sits well against hot milk and sugar. Filter coffee made with no chicory at all tastes, to most people here, like something is missing.

Why eighty-twenty and not something else

Push the chicory higher — thirty, forty percent — and the cup turns woody and flat. Drop it below fifteen and the decoction thins out and loses its colour.

Eighty-twenty is where the blend stays strong enough to taste of coffee and thick enough to survive the milk. It is not a law of nature, but it is where fifty years of selling across a counter in Davangere has landed us.

In the pack

Our Premium Golden Blend is the 80/20 blend, roasted dark and ground for the traditional steel filter. Everything else about it — the grind, the roast, the pack — is built around keeping that ratio tasting the way it should.