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

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The Art of Coffee Cupping

If you love coffee and are interested in it, FrontStreet Coffee highly recommends participating in cupping activities to explore how origin environments and green bean processing methods affect coffee flavors.

Origins and Evolution of Coffee Cupping

Coffee cupping originated in the late 19th century coffee trade. As coffee traders needed to evaluate large quantities of coffee quality, they adopted cupping as a rapid method. Of course, the earliest cupping format was quite simple. Hundreds of coffees were arranged side by side on tables, with traders quickly slurping each cup and giving thumbs up or down to indicate pass or fail—that's all. They didn't score the complex aromas, textures, and other aspects of coffee.

As the 20th century progressed, people became increasingly interested in the subtle and delicate flavors of coffee. In 1932, Ukers' work "All About Coffee" was the first book to deeply explore the concept of coffee cupping. During that era, the coffee industry's descriptions of coffee were quite rudimentary, with only 17 flavor vocabulary words, including smooth, rich, acidic, mild, Rio flavor, moldy, grassy, leathery, and my "favorite"—fishy. By the 1970s, as specialty coffee was beginning to emerge, coffee cuppers drew inspiration from the wine world and began developing a coffee vocabulary. The language of coffee gradually took shape. During cupping, people began to seriously and carefully record the entire complex and delicate sensory experience.

The natural characteristics of green coffee beans are volatile aromatic oils locked within cellular structures. The unique flavor and personality of each quality coffee comes entirely from these aromatic oils. Generally, taste, texture, and acidity combine to create the unique coffee flavor of each batch of beans, while roasting fully brings out the potential aromas within the flavor.

The Five Dimensions of Coffee Description

When describing coffee, we mainly characterize it from five aspects: mouthfeel, taste, aroma, flavor, and cleanliness. So what adjectives do these five aspects include?

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

Body: Light? Rich?

Also known as Body, it refers to the thickness and weight felt on the tongue when coffee is in your mouth. When coffee remains on your tongue, do you feel its weight and thickness are light or rich?

Texture: Smooth? Astringent?

The sensation as coffee slides across and remains on your tongue and mouth.

• Smoothness: The feeling of coffee weight sliding from your tongue into your throat like silk. Imagine 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 of the oral mucosa. The loss of saliva's lubricating effect creates astringent sensations. In the wine world, astringency isn't necessarily bad—good astringency can bring out the complexity of wine. However, in the coffee world, this 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 bright acidity, or a dead acidity with no aroma that makes your face contort?

Sweetness

Bitterness

Further taste-modifying terms:

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

Aroma - Volatile scents smelled before drinking

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

The difference between flavor and aroma is that flavor refers to the aromas stored in coffee oils that are catalyzed by saliva after entering the mouth, then travel 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... etc. For memory and communication, people try to use these familiar scents to create associations.

Cleanliness

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

Other aspects

• Hollow: Empty, lacking substance, with little flavor after the mid-palate.
• Balance: This refers to the overall experience—whether mouthfeel, taste, aroma, and flavor are balanced, without any particular sensation being overwhelming.

Coffee is truly God's treasure house of stored aromas in the human world. FrontStreet Coffee uses aroma bottles daily to train our sense of smell, and during cupping, we train by referencing similar aroma bottles to remember coffee flavors.

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