Three-Step Coffee Tasting: Aroma, Flavor, and Aftertaste

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Many coffee enthusiasts encounter this situation: I buy a bag of beans with citrus and peach flavors, but I can't taste them. I wonder if it's the beans, my brewing method, or my senses that are the problem.

Coffee flavor troubles many people. With so many flavors on the flavor wheel, why can't I taste them? After all, not everyone has professional sensory training. Or maybe I taste plum instead of peach. Such differences arise from variations in culture, lifestyle, diet, and region - they're simply different descriptions of the same cup of coffee. Therefore, the most important aspect of coffee tasting is communication. Share your feelings about different beans - different experiences naturally lead to different descriptions, but such communication can bring great enjoyment, can't it?

Here's a simple example from the SCAA flavor wheel: the chocolate aroma from the Maillard reaction, like milk chocolate, dark chocolate, and white chocolate. Without specialized training or high-level tasting skills, which enthusiast can truly distinguish the difference between these three chocolate flavors? (Now even chocolate has its own flavor wheel, hahaha)

Three Conditions for Understanding Coffee

To truly understand coffee, you need three conditions:

First: Have you had similar taste and smell experiences? If you've never eaten a peach, of course you can't recognize peach flavor. Coffee tasting | The importance of sensory training in tasting coffee — Olfactory chapter

Second: Wait until the coffee has completely cooled before tasting. Typically, coffee's fruity notes become more recognizable when cool. Coffee flavors unfold as the temperature decreases. Coffee tasting | How to identify lemon, grapefruit, and honey flavors in coffee?

Third: Coffee strength also affects a cup's character. For light-roast coffees with floral notes, it's recommended to brew them weaker to spread out the flavor spectrum, making it easier to distinguish the tastes (this explains why cupping uses a 1:18.18 powder-to-water ratio). Coffee tasting | Can you distinguish the floral aromas in coffee?

Tasting Example: Yirgacheffe Coffee

For example, when tasting a good cup of Yirgacheffe coffee, follow these steps:

• Drink coffee in small sips, slowly, even gently swish it, keeping the coffee liquid in your mouth and stirring it lightly
• Each sip reveals different layers as the temperature changes. The first couple of sips might taste bitter at the back of the tongue. As the coffee cools, it gradually transforms from bitter to acidic, revealing subtle citrus acidity
• When halfway through, the coffee changes from acidic to sweet, from bitter to pleasant, beginning to develop aftertaste. The tongue surface feels sweet, finally revealing caramel sweetness that lingers between mouth and nose. Taste the coffee's finish through retronasal olfaction
• After finishing, don't rush to wash the cup. Smell the sweet, pleasant aroma at the bottom

The Science of Flavor Perception

Brain receives information → compares → analyzes → remembers (the entire process)

We can smell an aroma and taste a flavor, but perhaps we can't describe them accurately. The flavor wheel categorizes all human-perceived taste systems concretely, corresponding to the aroma wheel for the olfactory system. Practicing with both together allows you to clearly perceive the most subtle differences among all aromas.

Three Steps to Coffee Tasting: Smell, Taste, and Savor

Step 1: Aroma

Start with smelling the aroma

Before tasting, use your nose to appreciate the coffee's aroma. Here you can confidently borrow wine tasting vocabulary. First, check if your coffee has aroma - floral, fruity, or wine-like. Also check for abnormal earthy, moldy, volatile acidic, or spicy flavors, which result from poor bean quality or improper storage. If the coffee is in good condition, its aroma will provide great enjoyment. You can confidently use the wine tasting system to evaluate coffee, seeking fruit, flower, plant, roasting, and spice aromas. Since the coffee's heat helps aroma diffusion, you can effortlessly capture the rich and complex fragrances of coffee.

Bringing it close to your nose and mouth, you'll perceive the dry aromas of different coffees from various origins. For example, in Latin American coffees, you'll notice nutty and dark chocolate-like flavors, while African coffees often feature floral and fruity notes. Close your eyes and slowly smell its wet aroma.

Step 2: Flavor

Tasting the flavors

When coffee enters your mouth, you can feel its flavors. Many enthusiasts, especially those new to coffee tasting, often think coffee doesn't taste as good as it smells. Indeed, sensory discrimination of coffee liquid in the mouth requires some practice, but over time, the flavors become detectable. Good coffee has no off-flavors - it's pure and clear. Cleanliness means from the first sip to the final aftertaste, there are no unpleasant off-flavors or textures.

Body is what we commonly call "body" - the mature, mellow, and rich taste expressed by the coffee liquid. The difference between a cup of water and a cup of coffee is that water has no flavor and isn't viscous, while espresso, rich in oils, has excellent body. A coffee with good body allows the aroma to linger longer in the mouth and creates a more extended finish.

Distinguishing Sweet, Salty, Sour, and Bitter

Where does sweetness come from?

Actually, people have long held a major misconception: people who like black coffee don't necessarily like bitterness, and bitterness shouldn't be the primary flavor that normal black coffee displays. If coffee berries are fully ripe, properly roasted, and maintain good freshness, the coffee itself will have some sweetness, especially showing caramel, honey, or even sugarcane sweetness in aroma. Meanwhile, many coffees inherently have excellent rounded textures. These delicate characteristics worth appreciating can be completely overwhelmed by just a spoonful of sugar and milk. Of course, if it's just mediocre quality or stale coffee, not adding milk and sugar is simply being hard on yourself.

Where does saltiness come from?

Many people can taste the sweet, sour, and bitter in coffee, but there's another flavor - "salty" - that's often overlooked. These four flavors influence and inhibit each other, while saltiness excels at hiding under the cover of the other three flavors.

Saltiness in coffee mainly comes from water-soluble minerals like potassium oxide and sodium oxide. Additionally, factors like the coffee bean's growing environment, roast level, freshness, processing method (such as Indian monsooning), and brewing technique all affect its saltiness level.

Furthermore, concentration or water pH can also make coffee taste salty.

Where does sourness come from?

Friends who often drink single-origin coffee, when they hear about sour coffee, mostly think of FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe beans. Indeed, FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe is representative of acidic coffee. Beginners who haven't encountered single-origin coffee might wonder: how can coffee be sour? Is sour coffee expired or poor quality? Actually, this sourness is different from that. Coffee contains hundreds of acidic compounds.

Coffee is the seed of a fruit, so it naturally has some fruit acid components. Like citric acid and malic acid - citric acid is an important organic acid that peaks in light roasts and continuously breaks down during later roasting stages. Typically, domestic roasters use light roasts for Yirgacheffe, Geisha, and Kenya, so they taste acidic.

Quality coffee's fruit acids have unique aromas that give coffee its soul; conversely, cheap coffee's acidity lacks aroma and even has strange flavors, so roasters naturally remove the acidity. Appropriate acidity can increase coffee's liveliness, brightness, and fruity character.

Where does bitterness come from?

Take a gentle sip - if there's a bitter taste, it affects the entire cup's complexity. Negative astringency reveals flaws in coffee quality. However, if bitterness can transform into pleasant aftertaste and astringency can stimulate saliva, quality bitterness can sometimes be a symbol of coffee quality.

Step 3: Perceiving the Aftertaste

The final aspect of tasting is aftertaste - the lingering sensation that coffee brings in the mouth and throat. After swallowing coffee, there's always a flavor that returns from the throat. Some aftertastes are long-lasting and clear, while others are brief and vague. We say that longer, clearer aftertastes are good, indicating higher coffee quality.

Throat sensation is generally divided into sweet, smooth, dry, and cool

• Sweet: the feeling of sweet aftertaste in the throat
• Smooth vs. Dry: Smooth means a comfortable, smooth feeling in the throat; dryness makes the throat uncomfortable, creating a dry sensation. In severe cases, it can even cause difficulty swallowing. Besides extreme throat discomfort, dryness also makes the drinker anxious
• Cool throat sensation is the most pleasant to experience, like the slight coolness from drinking mint water

Next, when you pick up a cup of coffee and bring it to your mouth to taste, whether you consciously explore this coffee's olfactory performance or not, realistically, this coffee's aroma has already entered your nasal cavity and been recorded by your brain.

Learning to taste coffee is a long process. Beginners shouldn't be discouraged by temporary difficulties. Expose yourself to more coffee, taste more coffee, and use the three steps of smelling, tasting, and savoring to appreciate coffee. Gradually, you'll discover the wonders of coffee flavors.

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473