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 coffee has acidity, but this is far from the citrus you describe. Others claim that flavor descriptions are nothing but deception.

During日常 web surfing, FrontStreet Coffee偶然 came across an article titled "Exploring Nutty Flavors in Wine." "How can wine have nutty flavors?" This would be the first question that FrontStreet Coffee, as a wine novice, would think of. This is quite similar to how coffee novices view how coffee can have citrus flavors.

The Role of Smell in Coffee Tasting

We won't详细 elaborate on why wine has nutty flavors here; interested friends can surf the web themselves. The perception of coffee flavors mostly originates from smell rather than taste. If you're suffering from a cold and taste coffee, you can detect the coffee's acidity but won't identify it as citrus acidity.

Of course, the smell mentioned here isn't simply about putting your nose close to the coffee. This olfaction is divided into orthonasal and retronasal olfaction. Orthonasal refers to the aroma detected by directly inhaling through the nose, while retronasal occurs after drinking coffee, when the coffee's aroma rises back through the connection between the nasal cavity and mouth. Generally, the flavors perceived when drinking are due to retronasal olfaction.

Building Your Flavor Library

After understanding the medium through which we perceive flavors, distinguishing specific flavors requires building a flavor library. This means creating memory points connected to foods like fruits you've eaten before. For example, we can recognize the taste of oranges not after eating them, but from the orange fragrance released when peeling the orange peel. When eating, it's a pleasant sweet and sour sensation. The orange flavor perceived when drinking coffee comes from smelling the aroma of peeling oranges.

Therefore, if you want to easily identify coffee flavors, try thinking about what the memory points of foods are when you're usually eating. Especially taste more fruits - the taste memories of related fruits can help improve coffee flavor appreciation. There's an interesting method: buy fruits with similar flavors and distinguish their tastes horizontally. For example, limes, lemons, oranges, tangerines, Shatian pomelos, grapefruits...

Understanding Flavor Descriptions

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

Then there are cherry blossom, watermelon, and blackcurrant flavors. I believe everyone is familiar with these three flavors, having tasted them in chewing gum. In reality, cherry blossom fragrance is very light - so light that you might not notice its existence with eyes closed. Almost all cherry blossom-flavored foods we've encountered have flavors that are not primarily from the cherry blossoms themselves.

The same applies to watermelon and blackcurrant flavors. When tasting chewing gum described as having watermelon flavor, it's clearly different from the watermelon fruit itself. Blackcurrant is also blackcurrant, and similarly, what we接触 more domestically is blackcurrant juice (soda), which differs significantly from the fruit itself. Therefore, we need to clearly understand the difference between watermelon and watermelon-flavored chewing gum, blackcurrant and blackcurrant soda... Only then will we not confuse them when describing coffee flavors.

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473