A Coffee Taster's Explanation of the Flavor Wheel: Is the Flavor Wheel a Standardized Coffee Tasting Database?

When we enjoy various delicious foods as children, our faces reveal expressions of surprise or satisfaction. This is the experience that tasting food brings us. Tasting subtle flavors in food is not something we learn as children. Corn dumplings taste like creamed corn, steak tastes like steak—this is how many of us are taught to understand flavors. According to our tasting patterns we adapt to, tasting coffee as anything other than coffee—especially various flavors like raspberry, chocolate, or flowers.

At FrontStreet Coffee, you can taste coffee flavors from around the world, such as the famous Blue Mountain Coffee, Panama's Geisha Coffee, Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe, which is a must-try favorite, and so on. There has always been a struggle between people who simplify flavors and those who appreciate complexity. One side thinks the other has wild imagination, while the other thinks one side is narrow-minded. New breakthroughs in sensory science have enabled researchers and ordinary people to understand what they eat and drink on a deeper level, and the gap between flavor ideologies is narrowing.

Sensory Science Meets Coffee

One of the most refined studies in modern sensory science aims to understand coffee flavors. The Specialty Coffee Association of America, in collaboration with World Coffee Research, recently launched the new Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel, a document containing a colored circle with various flavors that can exist in black, flavorless coffee.

A quick glance at the wheel might interest you, and a deeper look might confuse you. If you doubt whether coffee can have jasmine, rubber, or cherry flavors, you're not alone, but you might need to stay a little longer to judge.

Scientists Unite

In 2009, at the first annual SCAA symposium, the entire conference widely recognized that the professional coffee industry needed a standardized but accessible method to identify flavors in coffee. It was widely believed that the old flavor wheel published in 1995 was insufficient or not descriptive enough to meet the needs of the rapidly growing global coffee industry.

The SCAA listened and began working with World Coffee Research to build an updated standardized way to taste coffee and identify its flavors, without needing to master straws or explain to ordinary people what a bunch of chemicals and acids are.

Three years of work provided over 100 scientists to establish a standardized coffee tasting database. This database, called the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, carefully and systematically connects everyday products with coffee flavors.

Now, anyone can test their senses by comparing coffee flavors with actual standards, rather than tasting coffee and guessing the current flavors. For example, the blackberry flavor in coffee can be very close to Blackberry Smucker's Jam, as determined by the project's researchers, and users of the lexicon can even evaluate the intensity of these flavors.

To build the updated wheel, the SCAA invited professional coffee tasters and sensory scientists from the University of California, Davis to participate in the final construction phase by organizing flavors. These volunteers categorized items in the sensory lexicon by flavor categories and subcategories. Then, a program completed the items by creating a "similarity matrix," which was then simplified into the new flavor wheel, with colors and all.

How Does It Work?

The items on the flavor wheel are not grabbed out of thin air, nor are they wishful thinking. They are recorded flavors that coffee professionals and sensory scientists can identify.

To use this powerful tool, brew some fresh coffee and start from the center of the wheel. As you become more familiar with the coffee you're sipping, consider the broader flavors you might taste. Is it earthy and nutty, floral and sweet? These general observations can help you narrow down your search, even if you're not very confident in your diagnosis.

As you continue to identify more flavors, you naturally move toward the edge of the wheel and get more specific descriptions. This is the purpose of the Wheel, to allow anyone to enter the coffee tasting stage without formal training or complex processes.

To take your tasting journey to the next level, open the sensory lexicon and perform tests related to identified flavor attributes to see if they match. If it's not exactly the same but not completely different, it might be very close and should remain in the same category and color as your initial guess to find a closer match. If the coffee attribute and the item in the lexicon taste the same, then you've completed the task of both tools.

Taste More

To understand and use the new flavor wheel, the most important thing anyone can do is taste coffee. Pour-over coffee reveals more flavors, whether brewed in the morning or during a special visit to a coffee shop, you can consider the flavors and aromas of the coffee. Soon after, you will naturally taste coffee and understand its flavor components.

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