What Are Coffee Flavor Descriptions? How to Articulate Coffee Flavors? Describing Coffee Taste

Professional Coffee Knowledge Exchange

The vocabulary of taste is worth building deliberately, and the guide below lays out the framework FrontStreet Coffee uses when it talks about what is actually in a cup.

The Art of Coffee Cupping

If you love coffee and want to understand it more deeply, FrontStreet Coffee strongly recommends joining cupping sessions, where you can explore firsthand how a growing environment and a green bean processing method shape flavor.

Origins and Evolution of Coffee Cupping

Coffee cupping grew out of the coffee trade in the late 19th century. Traders who needed to judge large quantities of coffee adopted cupping as a fast way to do it. The earliest format was simple enough: hundreds of coffees were lined up side by side on long tables, and traders quickly slurped each cup and gave a thumbs up or down to signal pass or fail. That was all. They did not score the complex aromas, textures and other aspects of the coffee.

As the 20th century progressed, people grew more interested in the subtle, delicate flavors of coffee. In 1932, Ukers' work "All About Coffee" became the first book to explore the concept of coffee cupping in depth. In that era the industry's descriptions of coffee were rudimentary, limited to just 17 flavor words, among them smooth, rich, acidic, mild, Rio flavor, moldy, grassy, leathery and—my personal favorite—fishy. By the 1970s, as specialty coffee began to emerge, cuppers drew inspiration from the wine world and started building a coffee vocabulary. The language of coffee gradually took shape, and during cupping people began to record the entire complex, delicate sensory experience seriously and carefully.

The natural character of green coffee lies in volatile aromatic oils locked inside the cellular structure. The unique flavor and personality of any quality coffee comes entirely from these oils. Broadly speaking, taste, texture and acidity combine to create the distinctive flavor of each batch of beans, while roasting draws out the potential aromas hidden within that flavor.

The Five Dimensions of Coffee Description

When describing coffee, we mainly characterize it along five axes: mouthfeel, taste, aroma, flavor and cleanliness. So what adjectives belong to each of these five?

Mouthfeel - The weight and texture perceived by the mouth and tongue

Body: Light? Rich?

Also called body, this is the thickness and weight felt on the tongue while the coffee is in your mouth. When the coffee rests on your tongue, does its weight and thickness read as light or rich?

Texture: Smooth? Astringent?

This is the sensation as coffee slides across and remains on your tongue and mouth.

• Smoothness: The feeling of the coffee's weight sliding from your tongue into your throat like silk. Think of drinking a cup of rich hot chocolate—its texture is usually very smooth. Smoothness is often synonymous with richness, and coffees rich in oils frequently have this sensation.
• Astringency: A dry feeling in the mouth, with a wrinkling sensation across the oral mucosa. The loss of saliva's lubricating effect is what creates astringency. In the wine world astringency is not necessarily bad—good astringency can bring out a wine's complexity. In coffee, however, it is an unpleasant texture to be avoided.

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

Acidity: Bright acidity? Dead acidity?

Is it a pleasant, fruity sweet-and-sour brightness, or a dead acidity with no aroma at all that makes your face contort?

Sweetness

Bitterness

Further taste-modifying terms:

• Round: An overall balanced taste, very smooth, without unpleasant stimulating acidity.
• Sharp: Usually refers to obvious, stimulating acidity—to exaggerate slightly, the feeling that makes your facial nerves go haywire.
• Bright: Usually highlighted by acidity, making a particular coffee flavor feel especially fresh and clear in the mouth.

Aroma - Volatile scents smelled before drinking

Common descriptions include fruity, creamy, floral and so on, divided further into:

• Dry aroma: The enticing aroma that disperses into the air after grinding coffee beans.
• Wet aroma: The aroma smelled after brewing but before drinking.

Flavor - The captivating array of aromas experienced after coffee enters the mouth

Flavor differs from aroma in that flavor refers to the aromas stored in coffee oils, catalyzed by saliva once the coffee is in the mouth, then carried to the nasal cavity to be perceived. This is also the most fascinating aspect of coffee. Common descriptions include floral, citrus, berry, nut, caramel, chocolate and more. For memory and communication, people try to use these familiar scents to build associations.

Cleanliness

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

Other aspects

• Hollow: Empty and lacking substance, with little flavor after the mid-palate.
• Balance: This refers to the overall experience—whether mouthfeel, taste, aroma and flavor sit in equilibrium, with no single sensation overwhelming the rest.

Coffee is a remarkable storehouse of aromas in the human world. FrontStreet Coffee works with aroma bottles daily to train the sense of smell, and during cupping uses similar aroma references to memorize coffee flavors.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Abstract vocabulary only goes so far—the fastest way to learn it is to taste coffees whose aromatics are unmistakable, which is why light-roasted, fruit-forward beans make such good training. FrontStreet Coffee's Ethiopia Huakui is one of the best places to start. It is grown from local heirloom varieties, which is the reason its beans vary in size, and processed naturally, so the floral note comes first and the fruit follows close behind: cream strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus and blueberry. This is the same ripe tropical profile that won the lot first place at that year's TOH green bean competition, and it makes "sweetness," "fruit" and "juiciness" easy to put into words.

For clean, contrasting structure, FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe Gedeb cooperative coffee is washed and shows bright citrus over jasmine and a green-tea finish, a good example of what cuppers mean by "bright acidity" and "clean." FrontStreet Coffee's Kenya Cherry Tomato, grown in Kenya's Sika region at 1,550-1,750 meters from SL28 and SL34 and given a 72-hour double washed fermentation, shows cherry tomato, dark plum, snow pear and black plum with a brown sugar and green-tea finish—useful for practicing how sweetness and acidity interact. And FrontStreet Coffee's Ethiopia Kafa Forest comes from the UNESCO-recognized Kafa Biosphere Reserve, the birthplace of Arabica, where wild trees grow from 1,400 to 2,100 meters; after a medium-light roast it reads as jasmine, citrus and wild berry. Taste two of these side by side and the five dimensions stop being theory.