Techniques for Describing Coffee Flavors: How to Characterize the Taste and Mouthfeel of Pour-Over Coffee

Flavors Described by Baristas vs. Flavors You Actually Taste

Flavors described by the barista:

Flavors you taste:

(You at this moment: So real...)

Every time you see a barista tasting coffee and happily exclaiming "Wow! This is really good!! It has chamomile lemon juice gummy candies (for example)..." are you also trying hard to recall the flavors from the coffee you just drank?

FrontStreet Coffee mentioned in previous articles that if you want to improve your judgment of coffee flavors, you can practice more when tasting food by sensing the aromas that linger in your mouth/nasal cavity after swallowing. This is because the coffee flavors that baristas often describe are not entirely perceived through direct tasting, but rather after the taste buds perceive the coffee's acidity, sweetness, and bitterness, combined with the aromas detected through retronasal olfaction after swallowing the coffee, leading to associations with specific foods/flowers/objects.

Later, some friends provided feedback: "I followed all the instructions! I even tried eating fruits and sensing the lingering aromas in my mouth, then after a while drank coffee with the same fruit flavors, but I still couldn't taste them!!"

Drink More Coffee Brewed by Others, Share More Coffee You Brew Yourself!

When you drink too much coffee brewed by yourself, you develop a kind of numbness, making it difficult to clearly perceive whether the coffee has turned out poorly or not. Or perhaps from the beginning, your brewing parameters/method weren't suitable for this particular coffee bean, and you never brought out its best qualities.

The purpose of drinking more coffee brewed by others and sharing more coffee you brew yourself is to check whether your brewing has significant differences from others. Although the same coffee bean will exhibit different flavors when brewed by different roasters/brewers, it shouldn't be worlds apart—the basic flavor profile should still be similar. For example, when FrontStreet Coffee's barista brews the Guawa 5.0 coffee beans, it might have strawberry, citrus, melon, and fermented notes, but when you brew it, it might express as mixed berries, citrus, nectarine, and fermented notes.

Sharing is the greatest joy of drinking coffee. Share the flavors you taste, and listen to others share what they taste, then compare and find the reasons for some issues. The most important point is to be sincere and open—speak your true feelings! Don't feel embarrassed or think it's unpleasant to hear, because everyone's sensitivity to flavors is different, and perhaps some problems you couldn't detect yourself might be corrected through one sharing session!

Why Can't I Taste Some Flavors on the SCAA Coffee Flavor Wheel?

The SCAA flavor wheel was largely developed with reference to common flavor analogies in the United States. For example, grapefruit, cherries, prunes, maple syrup, etc., are things commonly seen and tasted in daily life in the US. Although these can also be purchased in China, people rarely eat these foods, so their memory of these flavors is not deep, making it difficult to make associations when tasting them in coffee.

Therefore, the SCAA can only be used as a reference, reminding you to think about similar types of analogies. For example, for grapefruit, we might associate it with pomelo or white pomelo; for another example, for prunes, we might associate them with smoked plums or regular plums. These flavor analogies familiar to Chinese people are actually unfamiliar to foreigners, but one thing is certain—these flavors will all be within the same category and won't deviate too significantly.

Chinese people look at the SCAA flavor wheel with confusion, and people from other countries naturally have the same troubles. The Belgian roasting company Cuperus created a consumer coffee flavor wheel that simplifies the coffee flavor wheel we normally recognize and categorizes it into six types: bright fruity, nutty, sweet fruity, floral, chocolatey, and spicy/vanilla.

Isn't this much simpler and easier to understand! Through such an extremely simple flavor wheel, consumers can understand the tendency of coffee flavors, while also allowing more people to understand that coffee flavors exist. This is the role of coffee flavor wheels today.

The flavor descriptions on coffee bean packaging and the SCAA flavor wheel can only be used as references. After all, judging flavors requires long-term accumulation and comparative judgment to form a memory bank—it's not guaranteed that eating more of a certain fruit/food will definitely help you remember it and be able to associate it when drinking coffee. So in the end, it comes back to the same point: if you want to taste coffee flavors, you need to drink more coffee brewed by others and share more coffee you brew yourself!

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473