Why Can't You Taste the Flavors on the Coffee Bag? How to Appreciate Pour-Over Coffee Flavors?

Understanding Coffee Flavor Notes

The colorful flavor descriptions on coffee bags always attract most beginners, who excitedly order a corresponding cup of coffee! However, upon first sip, they might find that something doesn't quite match up?

The flavor description clearly mentions citrus and pineapple, so why can you only taste sourness? Are these flavor descriptions deceptive? Actually, they're not—you just haven't mastered the method of identifying these flavors yet! The simplest method is—drink more coffee!

"Drink more" is FrontStreet Coffee's most common response when friends ask: "How can I quickly identify flavors?" Only by drinking more can you record the flavor characteristics of coffee. As the frequency increases and your tasting experience accumulates, you'll be able to distinguish flavors!

Even if you take professional coffee tasting courses, you need to repeatedly taste afterward to enrich your flavor library and quickly identify corresponding flavors. This is because courses mainly serve to organize knowledge and calibrate your senses! Ultimately, it always comes back to drinking more coffee! Therefore, multiple tastings are necessary to quickly identify flavors. But it's important to know that many friends still can't identify flavors even after drinking more coffee—this is because they haven't grasped the core of "drinking more." It's not like chugging water bottle after bottle! What we mean by "drinking more" is analyzing the taste of each sip and feeling it carefully. Only then can you understand what combinations form the structure of a flavor! Next, FrontStreet Coffee will share how beginners can learn to identify flavors through the act of "drinking coffee"!

1. Identify the Attributes of Taste

Mastering flavor identification requires long-term drinking accumulation to achieve results. If you're a beginner who immediately tries to identify specific flavors in a cup of coffee, you might find yourself disappointed! After drinking ten cups, you still might not figure anything out. So, we can set aside the ultimate result of coffee flavor identification and take it step by step! Start by training yourself to judge what characteristics the taste of this coffee has.

Taste refers to the five sensations our taste buds can perceive: sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and umami! The characteristics of taste refer to the state in which these tastes exist! This is easy to understand with an example: Ethiopian beans typically have a more obvious sourness! But this sourness changes depending on different conditions! For example: cultivation, processing, roasting, and brewing! The resulting sourness might be the bright sour-sweet taste of fruit, a gentle mild acidity, acetic acid from long fermentation, or the sharp sourness from under-extraction—these are all different characteristics of sourness.

Let's take Mandheling as another example! Coffee brewed from Mandheling has a distinct coffee bitterness, and the attributes of this bitterness are also completely different! It can be stimulating, pleasant, unpleasant, astringent, slightly sweet, or have a sweet aftertaste! Each time we drink, we can try to identify these different characteristics of taste! Once you can identify them, you can move to the next step—combining sensations to identify flavors!

2. Understanding Flavor

The reason we separate taste is because what we call "flavor" is actually composed of taste and aroma, with aroma being the main source of most flavors. The reason people use food to describe coffee flavors is mainly because we can taste similar aromas in coffee; secondly, it helps people who haven't tasted this particular coffee to have a general understanding of the bean's flavor profile. Therefore, generally speaking, our flavor descriptions for coffee are based on food aromas we encounter in our daily lives!

For example! Almost all Ethiopian coffee bags mention citrus flavor. If we break this down to understand it: in taste, it has a round, sour-sweet taste similar to citrus; in aroma, it carries the aromatic characteristics of citrus peel. When these combine, they form "citrus flavor"! Similarly with the pineapple flavor mentioned earlier—this bean has a full-bodied sour-sweet taste, and its aroma carries some pineapple-like notes. When they combine, they create pineapple flavor! Following this line of thinking when drinking coffee will help you experience more different tasting experiences!

If you want to understand flavor tasting more deeply, you can move on to the article "Understanding the Flavor Wheel is the First Step to Entering the World of Sensory Perception"! The flavor wheel can better calibrate flavor information and help you identify more different flavors in coffee!

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FrontStreet Coffee
No. 10, Bao'an Qianjie, Yandun Road, Dongshankou, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province