How Beginners Can Learn to Appreciate Single-Origin Coffee: How to Describe Pour-Over Coffee's Flavor Characteristics

Specialty coffee, after years of development, has formed a scientific system. From the cultivation and processing of green beans at the raw level, to roasting, then to brewing and tasting, there are very complete knowledge systems in place.

The improvement of green bean quality, roasting, and brewing quality ultimately serves to provide us with a better experience when tasting coffee. Therefore, learning to taste is actually an important part of coffee education. In coffee tasting, there are also some professional courses, such as Q-Grader (Coffee Quality Assessor) for industry professionals, and SCA Coffee Sensory Tasting courses for coffee enthusiasts.

These courses can help friends with a certain foundation of coffee knowledge to organize their knowledge and calibrate their sensory perception of coffee flavors. For complete beginners, the expensive tuition fees and the knowledge absorbed are far from proportional. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee doesn't really recommend novice beginners to impulsively sign up for coffee courses. You can first observe and learn some readily available basic coffee knowledge before making a choice.

Of course, the booming development of specialty coffee has also attracted many friends who want to understand and learn about coffee, including some who are eager to learn how to taste coffee flavors. They want to be like coffee professionals, able to spontaneously mention dozens of flavor descriptions when tasting a certain coffee. Regarding the question of where beginners should start learning to taste coffee, FrontStreet Coffee has a few suggestions that interested friends can try following.

Drink More!

If you ask a barista, "Why are you so sensitive to coffee flavors?" The reply you'll probably get is, "Drink often, and you'll be able to taste the flavors of coffee by drinking more."

This actually makes perfect sense. All coffee flavors, or taste memories, are accumulated through continuous tasting and memory. Unless you have an "emperor's tongue" or super strong memory that allows you to remember after tasting without forgetting, you still need to drink coffee frequently and remember the characteristics of each coffee.

Even if you take professional coffee tasting courses, you still need to continuously taste coffee to build your flavor library. Otherwise, the expensive tuition fees you paid will only get you a certificate in return.

Set Aside Flavors, Judge Tastes First

If you force yourself from the beginning to name some flavors no matter what, that's being a bit demanding and rushed. Coffee tasting is a long-term accumulation process, and there are no crash courses. If you're a beginner learning to describe coffee flavors and starting from scratch, FrontStreet Coffee suggests you first forget about flavor descriptions and start with the most basic act of drinking coffee and expressing your own feelings.

Coffee sensory perception is a relatively subjective judgment, which depends on personal taste preferences as well as sensitivity to various tastes. Coffee tasting, however, carries objectivity within subjectivity—that is, when judging the quality of a coffee, you cannot judge based on your own preferences, but rather describe objectively. Whatever taste you detect, you describe that taste.

Distinguishing the taste of a cup of coffee is the simplest thing, because there are only five basic tastes: sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, while coffee mostly only has three: sweet, sour, and bitter. FrontStreet Coffee gives an example: when we taste a washed Yirgacheffe coffee bean, the first sip reveals a very obvious sour taste. At this point, we need to determine whether this sourness is stimulating sharp acidity, sweet and sour fruit acidity, gentle slight sourness, or fermented vinegar-like sourness.

When tasting a Brazilian coffee bean, you can clearly perceive that the coffee is full of bitterness, but we need to determine whether this bitterness is comfortable bitterness, strong stimulating bitterness, extremely unpleasant burnt bitterness, bitterness that gives way to sweetness, or a slight sweetness emerging from the bitterness with some chocolate notes.

Try using this analogical method with different types of coffee and rank them. For example, if coffees A, B, and C are all sour coffees, but if ranked by acidity, A > B > C, judging by acidity quality, A's acidity is somewhat stimulating, sharp, and uncomfortable. Although B is also very sour, it's comfortable and pleasant to drink. C has a good sweet-sour balance—sour and sweet, like drinking complex fruit juice.

First, use this method to remember the tastes of coffee and develop the subconscious habit of tasting coffee flavors whenever you drink coffee.

Understand Flavors

The coffee flavors we describe are composed of taste and aroma. Coffee aroma is the source of many flavors. The reason we use other objects to describe coffee flavors is, on one hand, because we can taste flavors in coffee similar to other objects (fruits), and on the other hand, it helps people who haven't tasted this coffee get a flavor profile of it. Therefore, the flavor descriptions we use are all common foods from daily life that we frequently eat.

FrontStreet Coffee gives an example to help everyone understand: if a barista introduces this coffee bean as having strawberry flavor, breaking it down means that in terms of taste, the coffee bean's sweet-sour balance is similar to the sweet-sour sensation of berries like strawberries, while in terms of aroma, you can perceive the aromatic characteristics of strawberries in the coffee.

For example, in coffee flavor descriptions, rose, jasmine, vanilla, mango, roasted sweet potato, honey (water) are all reflected through aroma. Therefore, in addition to drinking and tasting more coffee, you also need to carefully appreciate the aromatic characteristics of foods around you in daily life. Only by storing these flavors in your brain's flavor library can you immediately react and identify what flavor it is when you encounter similar aromas in coffee next time.

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