How to Judge if Latte Tastes Good? Japan Launches Milk Coffee Flavor Wheel!

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The Iconic Coffee Flavor Wheel

The Specialty Coffee Association's (SCA) Coffee Flavor Wheel can be said to be one of the most iconic tools in the coffee industry. You can almost see its presence in every specialty coffee shop.

The Need for a Milk Coffee Flavor Wheel

The emergence of the coffee flavor wheel serves, on one hand, as a guide to coffee sensory experiences, guiding people's associations with coffee flavors, and on the other hand, provides a reference for tasters to judge the positive and negative aspects of flavors in coffee. However, today's coffee flavor wheel only focuses on the flavors of coffee beans themselves, providing a reference for judging whether black coffee tastes good or not. But not everyone loves to drink black coffee; more consumers prefer milk coffee. Many people believe that when milk is added to coffee, there's basically no need to worry about whether it tastes good or not, because milk fat and lactose will cover up many undesirable flavors in the coffee.

However, some people believe that today's specialty coffee places so much emphasis on the quality and taste presentation of a cup of coffee that even after adding milk, there should still be quality assessment and characteristic flavors. Therefore, there should be a flavor wheel specifically for milk coffee, providing a reference for coffee professionals and consumers. Consequently, Japan's Morinaga Milk Company recently published a "Milk Coffee Flavor Wheel" specifically developed for coffee with good milk in the scientific journal "Food Science and Technology Research."

Development Process and Research Methodology

The developers stated that a flavor wheel is a circular arrangement of terms that express food flavor characteristics and is widely used in the wine and coffee industries. However, the existing coffee flavor wheel is rather singular because, besides flavor differences caused by different coffee bean origins and roasting levels, coffee is often consumed with added milk and sugar. The flavor of milk coffee varies greatly depending on the balance between these two components. At the same time, the descriptions in the existing coffee flavor wheel are very professional, including many flavor terms that ordinary consumers cannot effectively relate to. Therefore, the target audience for this descriptive flavor approach is ordinary consumers, hoping to create a milk coffee flavor wheel that ordinary people can reference from the consumer's perspective.

The 60 test samples for this "Milk Coffee Flavor Wheel" were made from the following combinations: coffee beans from 5 producing regions (Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Costa Rica), coffee bean roasting levels (medium roast, dark roast), milk and coffee balance (more milk, more coffee), sugar content (with, without), and milk fat content (whole milk, low-fat milk).

Flavor descriptions were based on the experiences of 203 untrained consumers after drinking, followed by discussions with 12 beverage developers to eliminate ambiguous terms, redundant terms, and terms considered unnecessary for describing milk coffee flavor characteristics (qualitative screening). Finally, from the 456 collected descriptions of milk coffee flavor characteristics, 53 features were selected to create the milk coffee flavor wheel.

Validation and Purpose

Then, using the CATA (Check-All-That-Apply) method - a rapid sensory analysis that uses consumer evaluators instead of professional sensory evaluators - to conduct sensory evaluation on 6 milk coffee products, 42 of the 53 terms showed significant differences in term selection frequency among samples. Therefore, the descriptions on the flavor wheel can express differences in flavor characteristics between samples, and these terms can only be used for evaluating a cup of milk coffee.

The developers stated that the development of the milk coffee flavor wheel is more about helping everyone understand that adding milk to coffee is not meant to mask undesirable flavors in coffee, but that milk can provide a more balanced taste for coffee while allowing the coffee to produce other more unique and representative flavors.

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