How to Describe Coffee Flavors: Professional Terminology and Flavor Characteristics

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Have you ever noticed that every time you visit a coffee shop, when you order a single-origin coffee or select a bag of specialty coffee beans, the owner enthusiastically describes the coffee's flavor and mouthfeel with professional terminology? While these descriptions often sound beautiful and dreamy, it can be difficult to truly grasp what these coffee descriptions mean. Here, we've compiled some commonly used coffee adjectives by coffee professionals, along with personal insights and understanding of these terms. We believe this will help those who want to enter the coffee world to better understand or explain to others how wonderful coffee truly is.

When describing coffee, we mainly focus on five aspects: mouthfeel, taste, aroma, flavor, and cleanliness. So what adjectives does each of these aspects include?

Mouthfeel - How the mouth and tongue perceive the weight and texture of coffee

Body: Light or Rich?

Also known as Body, this refers to the thickness and weight felt on the tongue when coffee is present. When coffee rests on your tongue, do you feel its weight and thickness to be light or rich?

Texture: Smooth or Astringent?

The sensation as coffee slides across your tongue and mouth, and the feeling it leaves behind.

• Smooth: The feeling of coffee's weight sliding from your tongue into your throat like silk. Imagine drinking a cup of rich hot chocolate - its mouthfeel is typically very smooth. Smoothness is often synonymous with richness, and coffees rich in oils frequently have this characteristic.
• Astringency: A dry sensation in the mouth, with a puckering feeling on the oral mucosa. The loss of saliva's lubricating effect creates a constriction sensation. In the wine world, astringency isn't necessarily bad - good astringency can enhance wine's dimensionality. However, in the coffee world, this is an undesirable mouthfeel that should be avoided.

Taste - The sweet, sour, and bitter sensations perceived by taste buds on the tongue

Acidity: Bright Acidity or Dead Acidity?

Is it a bright acidity with fruity aromas and pleasant sweet-sour taste, or is it a dead acidity that lacks aroma and makes your face twitch?

Sweetness

Bitterness

Further descriptive terms for taste:

• Round: Overall balanced taste, very smooth, without unpleasant acidity that stimulates discomfort.
• Sharp: Usually refers to obvious, stimulating acidity - to exaggerate slightly, it's the kind of sensation that makes your facial nerves go haywire.
• Bright: Typically highlighted by acidity, making certain coffee flavors particularly fresh and clear in the mouth.

Aroma - The volatile scents perceived before drinking

Common descriptions include fruity, creamy, floral aromas, etc., which are further divided into:

• Dry Aroma: The enticing aroma that disperses into the air after coffee beans are ground.
• Wet Aroma: The aroma perceived after brewing but before drinking.

Flavor - The captivating various aromas perceived after coffee enters the mouth

The difference between flavor and aroma is that flavor refers to the aromas released from coffee oils when catalyzed by saliva after entering the mouth, which then travel to the nasal cavity and are perceived. This is also the most fascinating aspect of coffee. Common descriptions include floral, citrus, berry, nut, caramel, chocolate, etc. For memory and communication purposes, people try to use these familiar scents to create associations.

Cleanliness

Simply put, whether there are any off-flavors, impurities, or flavors that don't belong to coffee.

Other Characteristics

• Hollow: Empty, lacking substance, with flavor disappearing in the middle section after drinking.
• Balance: This refers to the overall sensation - whether mouthfeel, taste, aroma, and flavor are balanced, without any particular sensation being overly dominant.

Coffee is truly God's treasure trove of aromas stored in the human world. FrontStreet Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) regularly uses aroma bottles to train olfactory senses, matching similar aroma bottles during cupping sessions to remember 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