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@bombcup
tl;dr version - at our place we both pre and post roast blend.
OK, blending. Funnily enough, at Monmouth we're in the middle of a transition from post-roast blend to pre-roast blend. Since the start Monmouth has always post-blended the coffee, for the reason DJ speculated above. It also allows you to tweak the blend according to how your coffees are tasting on the day.
Currently the blend being sent to wholesale and mail-order customers is still post-blended due to the customer consultation not yet being completed. Here's how we do it;
First job of the day is to taste all the previous day's roasts. We're checking for roasting faults, natural defects and taints. If you heard us round the tasting table you'd think we hated coffee - we have to be super critical. The tasting notes are written up on each roast's data sheet and filed, along with a sample of the coffee for reference in case a complaint occurs - if we know who the customer is and the bestbefore date from the bag we can trace each component of the blend all the way back to the farm gate.
If we're happy with all the blend coffees then we'll start putting them together. Our current blend is 40% Brasil Santa Ines, 40% Guatemala El Capetillo and 20% Colombia Viota. We use the cooling tray at the front of the roaster to mix 61kg batches (60kg + 1 so we can overfill the bags). It's mixed for 5 minutes then removed and packed into kilo bags for dispatch the next day.
The pre-roast blend (not including organic blend) is served as drinks and sold over the counter in Monmouth's own shops. The decision was taken to trial a pre-blend when demand began to go beyond production capacity. Post-blending is very laborious - today for example I roasted over 500kg of blend components. That's going to take me 1 1/2 hours to blend in the morning. I'll then have around 5 hours roasting, plus lunch then cleaning and maintenance so it's pretty much at the limit. Pre-blending the shop coffee allows us to supply the demand within a normal working day.
The decision to pre-blend was not taken lightly, we spent many weeks tasting and tweaking the profile and would not have gone ahead with it if we did not think the result was at least equal to the post-blend. We discovered by roasting the coffees together that some melding of the flavours takes place - the flavour profile did not change once we'd nailed the profile but the drinks seemed to have extra depth and body from the mingling of oils aromas and vapours within the drum. The baristas reported that the shots were more consistent, probably from the more efficient mixing of the coffees in the roasting drum.
So that's the nuts and bolts of blending. Whether one method is more artisan than the other, all I can say is that coffee roasting, being a barista, patissiere, brewer, roofer, plasterer, whatever is a trade. A specific set of manual skills learned through work experience. The only artisans I've ever met are those who feel the need to apologise to their peer group because they feel that becoming a tradesman is not befitting of their expensive education.