Have You Experienced All Five Basic Tastes of Coffee: Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Salty, and Umami?

The Five Basic Tastes of Coffee

The basic tastes of coffee break down into sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami.

FrontStreet Coffee will now walk through each of these five basic tastes.

Sweetness

We typically use "sweet" to describe the taste of sucrose, better known as table sugar, which nearly everyone finds pleasant. Sugar is the purest form of sweetness, but plenty of other foods bring sweetness of their own - fruits, for instance, which contain fructose, and dairy products, which contain lactose. Sugar is a direct source of energy, which is why we naturally enjoy eating sweet foods.

Sourness

We use "sour" to describe the taste of acidic substances. Lemon juice and vinegar are the two most common acidic foods, and both are high in acidity - lemon juice carries fruit acid while vinegar carries acetic acid. Acidity is usually appealing, but once it climbs too high it immediately becomes hard to consume.

Some acids make food and drink taste fresh and refreshing, while other sour flavors signal that food has spoiled.

Bitterness

People's tolerance for bitterness varies enormously. Bitter foods, eaten alone with nothing to balance them, are often hard to swallow. Most medicinal compounds taste bitter, though the intensity differs from one to the next.

Saltiness

"Salty" is the term we use to describe sodium ions. Sodium chloride is the common form of salt. Many foods contain sodium naturally, seafood and celery among them.

Umami

"Umami" is the hardest taste to pin down. Umami is the taste of glutamic acid. We sometimes describe it as meaty, mellow and rich, and satisfying.

The Truth About Taste Perception

Most people who have studied coffee have heard that the tip of the tongue senses sweetness, the front half of both sides senses saltiness, the back half of both sides senses sourness, and bitterness is sensed at the back of the tongue. I have to tell you that this is not entirely correct.

The tip of the tongue can perceive the other tastes too, and likewise both sides and the back of the tongue can perceive the other tastes. That is because the taste receptors, or taste buds, on our tongue are distributed at random rather than confined to specific zones. Since the tip of the tongue happens to hold more taste buds that register sweetness, we tend to perceive more sweetness there. The same logic applies to sour, salty and bitter tastes: perception is stronger in certain areas simply because those areas hold more buds that receive that particular taste.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

To taste these basic tastes in balance, light-roasted floral and fruity coffees are a wonderful place to start. FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Gedingding Coffee is a common first stop for anyone new to specialty coffee, with bright citrus, berry and floral notes and a green-tea sweetness that lingers.

If you live for the sweet, juicy end of the spectrum, FrontStreet Ethiopia Huakui Coffee delivers it in full. Its tropical-fruit aroma is strikingly bold - strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit and even lychee come through clearly - with pronounced sweetness, very little bitterness and a smooth, juice-like body.

Fans of a crisp, bright sourness should look at FrontStreet Kenya Little Tomato Coffee. Grown in Kenya's Thika region at 1,550-1,750m from the classic SL28 and SL34 varieties, it is processed with Kenya's signature 72-hour double washed fermentation and roasted light, preserving a lively acidity. The dry aroma alone brings dried cherry tomato and florals, and the cup shows cherry tomato and dark plum, plump and juicy, with a mid-palate sweetness of pear and black plum and a clean finish of yellow sugar and a hint of green tea.