How to Describe the Flavor of Pour-Over Single-Origin Coffee | Detailed Guide to Coffee Bean Flavors and Selection

In the previous article, FrontStreet Coffee shared how to identify memorable flavor notes. Daily flavor memory is beneficial for tasting and identifying flavors when drinking coffee, so this aspect emphasizes accumulation.

However, most people's memory is quite fragile, which manifests in flavor expression as the ability to recognize familiar flavors but struggle to articulate specific tastes. This is actually because our brain's retrieval of "memory" is quite primitive. Think back to memorizing English vocabulary in school - associative memory was far more efficient than rote memorization.

The same principle applies to understanding flavors. You need to learn to categorize and organize the knowledge you've already memorized. You can also organize this according to the flavor relationships on the coffee flavor wheel. Take fruits as an example - if you try various fruits while blindfolded, you can still clearly distinguish between different fruits because the unique aroma, acidity, and texture of fruits provide us with three reference points. When the aroma, acidity, and texture match the fruit in your memory, you can naturally identify it with 100% accuracy.

However, if you remove the texture - meaning you taste them all as juices - your criteria are reduced to just two: aroma and sweet-sour balance. Yet you can still identify most fruits accurately, relying on the unique aromas of the fruits themselves.

Next, FrontStreet Coffee wants to share a story about the relationship between cherry blossom-flavored foods and actual cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms give people a beautiful feeling, but when made into food, they become unappealing. In reality, cherry blossoms themselves are almost tasteless. Cherry blossom-flavored foods are created by flavorists using edible flavorings. Creating a genuine cherry blossom flavor challenges even the best flavorists because cherry blossoms are very subtle and virtually tasteless. However, they thought about the associative method of cherry blossoms - the feeling of spring. Whether in food packaging or the peculiar sweet-sour taste, they deliberately express "spring day." Of course, ideals are beautiful, but reality is often harsh. Keep it up, flavorists!

FrontStreet Coffee shares this story to express that many things are potentially connected to each other. Fruits range from most sour to sweetest, colors from green to yellow to red to black. Freshness with light colors, heaviness with dark colors.

So, returning to drinking coffee, what color of fruit does the coffee's sweet-sour balance belong to? Is the aroma stimulating and colorful like citrus fruits, subtly sweet like berries, or heavily fermented like tropical fruits? By extension, the same applies to floral notes, nuts and cocoa, and roasted flavors.

However, FrontStreet Coffee must remind everyone: coffee is coffee. When coffee has strawberry flavors, it doesn't mean coffee is strawberry juice. When coffee has a juice-like quality, it doesn't mean it is juice.

Important Notice :

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Tel:020 38364473