How to Drink Bourbon Coffee - Basic Characteristics of Yellow Bourbon Coffee Beans

Professional coffee knowledge exchange, more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat public account cafe_style)

FrontStreet Coffee · Brazilian Yellow Bourbon Flavor Characteristics and Tasting Methods

Yellow Bourbon is a unique Bourbon variety from São Paulo, Brazil. It's named "Yellow Bourbon" mainly because the fruit doesn't turn red when ripe, but instead presents an orange-yellow color. When Yellow Bourbon is grown in high-altitude areas, it exhibits excellent flavor characteristics. It once dominated Brazil's "Cup of Excellence" competition for two consecutive years, with the top three prizes almost entirely swept by Yellow Bourbon, creating a sensation in the specialty coffee world!

The flavor of FrontStreet Coffee's Brazilian Yellow Bourbon typically features nuts and chocolate, with balanced and smooth acidity, a weak and clean bitterness, creating an overall bright and refreshing experience!

Coffee Tasting

1. Aroma

Dry Aroma:

Bring freshly ground coffee powder close to your nose and mouth, and you'll perceive different dry aromas from coffees of various origins. For example, in Latin American coffees, you'll smell nut and dark chocolate-like aromas, while African region coffees often have floral and fruit-type flavors.

Wet Aroma:

Pour the prepared coffee into a cup, close your eyes, and slowly smell its wet aroma. Perhaps you'll detect nutty aromas, chocolate scents, fruit fragrances, or floral notes.

2. Tasting Flavors

When coffee enters your mouth, you can feel its flavors. In this aspect, many enthusiasts, especially those just beginning to explore coffee tasting, often think that 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 various flavors can be perceived.

Another key point in coffee tasting is how to distinguish between coffee's sweetness, saltiness, acidity, and bitterness.

Body is what we commonly call "body," referring to the mature, mellow, and rich taste presented by the coffee liquid. The difference between a glass of water and a cup of coffee lies in the fact that water has no flavor and isn't viscous, while espresso rich in oils has excellent thickness. A coffee with good body allows aromas to linger longer in the mouth, with a more extended aftertaste.

Body not only affects your overall coffee experience but also influences the completeness of aromatic substance release in the coffee. Most cuppers or consumers cannot clearly point out which mouthfeel is good and which is bad, but at least you know which ones you like and which you don't. In my opinion, the judgment of coffee body varies from person to person.

Sweetness

Tasting: Coffee with sweetness is like a fruit, containing fructose within the coffee beans. Even in a cup of black coffee, behind the acidity or bitterness, there must be a sweet taste presented. Additionally, different coffee beans have varying levels of aftertaste sweetness—there's no good or bad, only personal preference. However, if the aftertaste is too dry and astringent, it indicates poor quality coffee beans.

Cleanliness

Tasting: Actually, coffee's astringency doesn't need to be eliminated but rather suppressed, and the degree of suppression needed varies according to each person's different preferences. Flavors that are more chaotic or mixed with undesirable negative tastes are not clean enough.

Bitterness

Tasting: Specialty coffee doesn't have simple "bitterness." Generally, we roughly use "bitterness" to describe the pleasant bitterness among nutty flavors, dark chocolate flavors, and caramel flavors.

Acidity

Tasting: "Sweetness is easy, good acidity is rare." The acidity of quality coffee should be contained within the coffee, not obvious and sharp. Quality coffee often contains large amounts of organic acidic substances, embodying rich acidic flavors like citrus and berries. The quality of acidity is an important factor in specialty coffee.

Saltiness

Tasting: Actually, saltiness comes in many types. Aroma can make people think of heavily salted foods, such as the smell of stir-fried dishes with too much salt, and the smell from the bottom of the cup after drinking coffee, which smells salty and reminds one of salty snacks like shrimp crackers and Wang Wang senbei, and so on. In terms of mouthfeel, it's generally the taste of salt.

When making pour-over and espresso occasionally, I can taste and "smell" [saltiness] (smelling refers to the aroma after grinding), and most of the time, saltiness appears more prominently in Espresso.

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473