What Flavors Does Pour-Over Coffee Have? Is It Bitter? SCA Coffee Sensory Tasting Course Content Sharing

"How do you detect citrus flavors in coffee?"

Many friends express admiration for baristas who can easily identify specific flavors in coffee. Some say they can taste that a coffee has acidity, but it feels far from the citrus being described. Others claim flavor descriptions are nothing but a con.

While browsing online, FrontStreet Coffee happened to come across an article titled "Exploring Nutty Flavors in Wine." "How can wine have nutty flavors?" That would be the first question a wine novice would ask, and it is much the same as how coffee novices wonder how coffee can taste of citrus.

The Role of Smell in Coffee Tasting

We won't go deeper into why wine has nutty flavors here; anyone interested can look it up. What matters is that the perception of coffee flavors comes mostly from smell rather than taste. If you have a cold and taste coffee, you will notice the acidity but will not identify it as citrus acidity.

Of course, the "smell" here is not simply putting your nose close to the cup. Olfaction is divided into orthonasal and retronasal. Orthonasal refers to aroma detected by inhaling directly through the nose, while retronasal occurs after you drink, when the coffee's aroma rises back through the connection between the nasal cavity and the mouth. Generally, the flavors we perceive while drinking come from retronasal olfaction.

Building a Flavor Library

Once you understand the medium through which we perceive flavor, distinguishing specific flavors requires building a flavor library. That means creating memory points tied to foods you have eaten before, such as fruit. For example, we recognize the taste of an orange not after eating it, but from the orange fragrance released when the peel is torn open. When eating, it is a pleasant sweet-and-sour sensation. The orange flavor perceived when drinking coffee comes from smelling the aroma of peeling an orange.

So if you want to identify coffee flavors easily, think about what the memory points of foods are when you eat them normally. Taste more fruit in particular; the taste memories of related fruits help improve your appreciation of coffee flavors. An interesting method is to buy fruits with similar flavors and distinguish them side by side, for example limes, lemons, oranges, tangerines, Shatian pomelos, and grapefruits.

Understanding Flavor Descriptions

Another point is that the specific foods named in a flavor description sometimes differ from your own understanding. A direct example is dark chocolate. For many people, chocolate is sweet, but the dark chocolate generally described in coffee refers to chocolate with a cocoa solids content between 70% and 99%, higher in purity, dominated by bitterness and accompanied by a slight acidity.

Then there are cherry blossom, watermelon, and blackcurrant flavors. Everyone is probably familiar with these three from chewing gum. In reality, cherry blossom fragrance is very light, so light that you might not notice it at all with your eyes closed. Almost all cherry-blossom-flavored foods we have encountered get their flavor primarily from something other than the blossoms themselves.

The same applies to watermelon and blackcurrant. When tasting a chewing gum described as watermelon flavored, it is clearly different from the watermelon fruit itself. Blackcurrant is also blackcurrant, and what we tend to encounter more often is blackcurrant juice or soda, which differs significantly from the fruit. We need to clearly understand the difference between watermelon and watermelon-flavored chewing gum, between blackcurrant and blackcurrant soda, so that we do not confuse them when describing coffee flavors.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

The best way to train your palate is to taste clean, well-defined coffees. FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Gudingding Cooperative is a washed Ethiopian coffee with clear citrus, berry, and floral notes and a green-tea-like sweetness, gentle and bright rather than sharply acidic, which makes it an easy bean for a beginner to practice on.

FrontStreet Sun-Dried Huakui offers a more overtly fruit-driven set of flavors with strawberry, passion fruit, jackfruit, and even lychee, useful for building the fruit memory points described above. FrontStreet Kenya Cherry Tomato sharpens the citrus side of your palate with bright cherry tomato and dark plum acidity over a full, juicy body.