How to Taste Coffee Flavors: What Does the Coffee Flavor Wheel Mean?

Introduction

When we write cupping notes, we throw around descriptions like "coffee blossom aroma," "lemon acidity" and "citrus acidity." Some friends wonder how we keep coming up with so many words. The secret, in fact, is to use aroma bottles often. As the name suggests, these are bottles that give off fragrances, and that literal reading is not far off. So why do these bottles exist, and what do they have to do with coffee?

Aroma bottles sort aromas into systems and present each scent through chemical oils, which helps calibrate our sense of coffee smell and makes specific aromas easier to memorize. In their earliest form, aroma bottles were made by gathering various materials and simply sealing plants or foods into glass jars. During training you would open the jar and take a sniff. But fresh materials without special preservation spoilage quickly and turn unpleasant, which is what pushed the development of the modern chemical-oil bottles that keep for more than 5 years.

Two main types of aroma bottles are on the market today. One is the 36-scent Le Nez du Café (literally "Coffee Nose") made by Edition Jean Lenoir of France; the other is the 100-scent Coffee Flavor Map released this year by Korea's Scentone. The 36-scent set is the one used in current SCAA certified courses. Beyond helping you remember specific flavours, its four major categories also reveal the different flavours that develop during roasting, offering complete coffee knowledge training. So how many categories does it cover?

I. Enzymatic Category

(Fruits): Lemon, Apple, Apricot

(Vegetables): Potato, Cucumber, Garden Peas

(Floral Nectars): Coffee Blossom, Tea Rose, Honeyed

II. Sugar Browning Category

(Four Nuts): Roasted Almonds, Roasted Peanuts, Roasted Hazelnuts, Walnuts

(Three Desserts): Caramel, Dark Chocolate, Vanilla

(Two Meals): Toast, Fresh Butter

III. Dry Distillation Category

(Spices): Pepper, Coriander Seed, Clove-like

(Beverage Ingredients): Black Currant-like, Maple Syrup, Malt

(Herbal Processing): Roasted Coffee, Pipe Tobacco, Cedar

IV. Aromatic Taints Category

(Wet/Musty): Earthy, Straw, Medicinal

(Dry/Harsh): Rubber, Leather, Smoke

(Pleasant Aromas): Coffee Pulp, Basmati Rice, Cooked Beef

Day-to-day taste and smell training can be as simple as eating more fruit and paying attention to its aroma. For deeper work, use aroma bottles alongside freshly ground coffee to compare dry aroma, wet aroma and flavour. Smelling too many bottles in a row can make you dizzy, so start with the cap, then the oil, swinging it left and right so the nasal cavity takes in the full scent. Smelling in comparison sharpens your ability to tell aromas apart. Whatever set you use, steady practice will improve your olfactory discrimination.

Applying Aroma Bottle Knowledge to Coffee Tasting

Now that we know the 36 aroma bottle categories, how do we put them to work when tasting? Take a few single-origin beans as examples:

Coffees dominated by floral and fruity notes: Floral aromas are round, soft and comforting; fruit aromas are fresh, lively and invigorating, recalling oranges, peaches and other tropical fruits that make the mouth water.

FrontStreet Coffee - Flower Butterfly

Flavours: citrus, jasmine, honey peach, grape, caramel, honey, with a charming high mountain tea aroma.

Sidamo - Buku Abel

Flavours: passion fruit, fermented wine aroma, strawberry, jackfruit.

Natural Process Yirgacheffe - Red Cherry

Flavours: strawberry, plum, sugarcane.

Kenya Natural Process Bourbon - Hania

Dry aroma shows natural-process fermentation, dried fruits, vanilla, caramel and mixed fruits. Substantial, juice-like body with a finish of berries, rich jackfruit and coffee blossom aroma.

Coffees dominated by sugar browning and dry distillation flavours:

Golden Mandheling

Flavours: quality herbal notes, clove, pine aroma, caramel, cream, nuts, dark chocolate.

Jamaica Blue Mountain

Flavours: chocolate, nuts, cream, brown sugar. Balanced sweet, sour and bitter flavours with moderate soft acidity and light fruit aroma.

Yunnan - Flower Fruit Mountain

Flavours: melon and fruit aroma, nuts, milk chocolate, cream, herbal notes, brown sugar, honey.

Great beans map neatly onto certain aroma categories. If you don't have aroma bottles at home, simply try more fruits and take in more flower aromas. Continuous practice makes it easier to identify different flavours. That's all for today's sharing, and we hope it helps.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

The flavour categories above live in the cup, so it helps to taste them against a deliberately balanced roast. FrontStreet Coffee's Brazil Queen Estate is a good starting point for anyone building a palate: a Yellow Bourbon from Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer, it is medium roasted to bring out cream, peanut, chocolate, toasted bread and sugarcane sweetness. That gentle, even profile makes it easy to line the cup up against the sugar-browning and nut aromas on the wheel, and it works just as well in a pour-over as in a moka pot or espresso machine.

If you want to train your nose on fruit-forward sweetness instead, FrontStreet Coffee's Strawberry Candy Geisha blend is a natural fit. It combines two well-known growing regions: a honey-processed coffee from Costa Rica and a washed Geisha from Panama. FrontStreet roasts it medium so the cup keeps both its orange-blossom honey character and a rounded sweetness, suited to cold brew, pour-over and espresso alike.

For the herbal, tea-like side of the dry distillation category, FrontStreet Coffee's 2013 Sun-Dried Typica offers a classic Yunnan small-bean profile. A medium roast keeps it even and soft, with nut, brown sugar, black tea and dried apricot notes, and it performs well as pour-over, cold brew or drip coffee.