How to Taste Single-Origin Coffee: A Guide to Tasting Mandheling Coffee

Coffee tasting may sound difficult, but it is actually quite simple. There is a universal formula that, once followed, lets us judge whether a cup of coffee is good or bad. And when we turn the feelings from the tasting process into words, we can describe a cup of coffee with real fluency. So next, FrontStreet Coffee shares the five steps of coffee tasting, to help everyone become a faster master of tasting and description.

Step 1 of Tasting: Aroma

Coffee generates a large number of aromatic compounds during roasting through chemical reactions. These are not extracted by water alone. When beans are ground into powder, a great many aromatics are released as the bean structure breaks apart. Coffee tasting therefore actually begins the moment the beans are ground. The first step is to capture and feel those aromas drifting in the air before we sip. Simply put: smell the aroma.

Smelling the aroma has two parts: the dry aroma and the wet aroma. The dry aroma is the fragrance given off by the grounds before brewing, when the aroma concentration is strongest. The wet aroma is released after the grounds meet hot water. Compared with the dry aroma, the wet aroma is much weaker, but because the concentration has dropped, we get a chance to catch different aromatic characteristics.

Generally, the aroma of light to medium roasts is made up of fresher notes like florals and fruit, while medium to dark roasts express deeper aromas such as roasted, chocolate, and spice. Then, according to each aromatic expression, we can add the matching adjectives to form a descriptive sentence. Take floral aroma as an example: there are many adjectives for it, such as rich or elegant, and you can choose them to suit the character of the aroma.

Step 2 of Tasting: Taste

After smelling the aroma, we reach the most important part: drinking. We need to experience the coffee in the mouth from three angles. Because they happen at once, FrontStreet Coffee explains them one by one. First, the taste of the coffee. In coffee we can perceive four tastes: sour, sweet, bitter, and salty.

But we don't just perceive which flavors are present; we also distinguish their intensity and quality. FrontStreet Coffee uses acidity as an example, since it is predominant. Coffee acidity has good and bad distinctions, which we habitually call "acidity quality." Excellent acidity makes coffee very pleasant to drink, described with words like soft, bright, and lively. Conversely, poor acidity makes coffee hard to swallow, described with words like sharp, dull, and irritating.

Step 3 of Tasting: Flavor

Flavor perception is the most popular aspect of specialty coffee. It means combining the aromas released from the coffee in the mouth with its taste, then associating them with the taste of certain foods we commonly encounter in daily life.

This is the greatest joy of coffee tasting, and also the hardest part. The core reason many friends cannot describe coffee is that they cannot associate flavors, remaining stuck at the second step of taste perception. In that case, FrontStreet Coffee suggests first understanding flavor perception through our article "Is Coffee Flavor Metaphysics?"

Once we have mastered flavor perception, we can combine it with taste to build simple sentences. For example, if you perceive citrus flavor from the coffee and its acidity feels bright, the description could be "bright citrus acidity."

Step 4 of Tasting: Mouthfeel

Mouthfeel refers to the tactile sensation coffee gives us. The term "body" that we often hear in the coffee world mainly describes the richness or thickness of coffee. Body is the "weight" the tongue feels after coffee enters the mouth.

Take an example FrontStreet Coffee often uses: skim milk, whole milk, and cream give three completely different mouthfeels. Skim milk feels light as water, whole milk is richer, fuller, and smoother, and cream is very rich and heavy. The same principle applies to coffee.

When the body is higher, the weight on the tongue is heavier; when the body is lower, the opposite is true.

Final Step of Tasting: Aftertaste

After experiencing the coffee from the above angles, we can swallow. After swallowing, one thing remains to perceive, and that is the aftertaste. In other words, coffee tasting is only complete once we have experienced the aftertaste. In simple terms, aftertaste is the aroma that remains in the mouth after swallowing, or the point at which you can still clearly feel coffee aroma rising from your mouth.

The aftertaste mainly comes from retronasal olfaction "capturing" coffee aromas. The principle is simple: coffee contains many oil-soluble aromatic compounds. After drinking, some of the oils stay in the mouth rather than being swallowed. As these oils gradually break down, the aromatics hidden within them volatilize and are caught by our retronasal olfaction, and that is how we perceive the aroma, which is the aftertaste.

Aftertaste is evaluated on two fronts: how long it lasts and the quality of the aroma. An excellent aftertaste lingers longer, since this indicates the coffee has a high content of substances and was fully extracted (the timing varies with the extraction method). Judging quality from the aroma follows the same principle as flavor: mainly whether the flavor it expresses is positive or negative.

Take FrontStreet Coffee's light-roasted pour-over as an example. In light-roasted pour-over, a high-quality aftertaste typically lasts for more than ten seconds, with expressions like light florals, tea-like sensations, and honey. A poor aftertaste is very short or even absent, expressed as astringent, bitter, or otherwise uncomfortable tastes.

How to Taste a Cup of Golden Mandheling Coffee?

Golden Mandheling Coffee is PWN Company's exclusive signature product. Because "Golden Mandheling" was registered as a trademark early on, only Mandheling produced by PWN Company can be called "Golden Mandheling." Its hallmark is multiple screenings of the green beans, yielding exceptionally high overall quality. PWN buys Mandheling green beans of 18 mesh or above, G1 grade with fewer than 3 defective beans per 300g sample, the highest grade of Indonesian green beans. Strict standards then follow with 1 machine selection plus 3 hand selections to remove defective beans, ensuring uniform color, shape, and size. As a result, PWN Golden Mandheling tastes cleaner and brighter, with a more obvious body and sweetness.

Ground into powder, Golden Mandheling gives off a rich roasted hazelnut aroma. During the hot-water bloom, the caramel flavor is very prominent. On the palate it shows dark chocolate, nutty, caramel, and sweet fruit flavors. As the temperature drops, various spice notes begin to fill the mouth. The finish is long-lasting, with high balance, multi-layered change overall, a rich and full body, and a clean mouthfeel.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Once you can taste with these five steps, try them on a wet-hulled Sumatran. FrontStreet's PWN Golden Mandheling is the highest grade available: PWN buys only quality Mandheling green beans, then applies machine and hand sorting to keep full, unblemished beans, and everything it releases is specialty grade. The beans are uniform, full, large and bright with a low defect rate, and a medium-dark roast leaves a rich roasted aroma, a clean mouthfeel, and a full body that suits anyone who dislikes acidity.

Pour-over best shows its charm. FrontStreet suggests 87-88°C water, 15g of coffee, a 1:15 ratio, and a coarse-sugar grind, poured in three stages. A 30ml first pour wets all the grounds for degassing; a 100ml second pour flushes out the golden crema and lifts the bed; the final gentle 95ml down the center raises sweetness, giving an overall full body with caramel sweetness and chocolate and nut flavors. For espresso, FrontStreet's Classic Blend layers a medium-dark Mandheling over Brazilian cream and nut notes, foregrounding butter, roasted chestnut, and caramel, with sandalwood, herbal, and spice notes from the Mandheling and a touch of Robusta for crema.