How to Enhance Coffee Flavor Perception? High-Definition Coffee Flavor Wheel! How to Use It? What Makes Up the Aroma Needed for Pour-Over Coffee

How to Quickly Enhance Your Coffee Flavor Perception

Coffee offers rich and varied flavors that have captivated countless people, all eager to experience that fleeting "glimpse" that lingers on the palate! This is why coffees with naturally prominent flavors tend to be more expensive. Therefore, if we want to understand what makes premium coffee "premium," we must diligently practice our flavor perception abilities. So today, FrontStreet Coffee will share - "How to quickly enhance your coffee flavor perception"~

Coffee Flavor: Taste and Aroma

Coffee flavor is composed of two elements: taste and aroma! Based on the combination of taste and aroma, we associate corresponding concrete foods - this is coffee flavor! Taste is easy to understand: sour, sweet, bitter, and salty - these are the four tastes we can clearly distinguish in coffee through the taste buds on our tongues. Therefore, FrontStreet Coffee won't dwell too much on taste. Compared to the taste perception we've trained since childhood, the ability to distinguish aromas is more important.

What Makes Up Coffee's Aroma?

To clearly distinguish the aromas in coffee, we must first understand what structure it actually has! Coffee's aroma components are composed of 29 categories of compounds including diketones, furfuryl mercaptan, furans, alkyl pyrazines, and others. To date, over a thousand aromatic compounds have been discovered in coffee! This vast number far exceeds the types of aromas that ordinary people can distinguish, and aromas are similar rather than exactly identical. This is why identifying aromas is so challenging.

The variety of coffee aromatic substances is inseparable from the various reactions that occur when coffee beans are roasted. When coffee beans are still in their green state, they already contain more than 300 types of aromas. After undergoing various chemical reactions during roasting, they can develop over a thousand aromas! These aromas, as aromatic substances, are all volatile. This is why coffee that has been stored for a long time isn't as fragrant as freshly brewed coffee - not just because it has cooled or aged, but because the aromas have completely evaporated. Therefore, if we want to perceive distinct coffee flavors, it's best to taste and experience them during the period immediately after brewing.

Two Mechanisms for Perceiving Aroma

We can experience aromas through two mechanisms in the human body. The first is our orthonasal olfaction: orthonasal olfaction is when we perceive external aromas by inhaling them through our nose. The second is retronasal olfaction: retronasal olfaction perceives aromas through the nasal passage in our mouth! When coffee is in the mouth or being swallowed, the coffee's aromas are drawn in through the nasal passage in the mouth and perceived.

Practice: Drink More, Smell More, Feel More

"Drink more, smell more, feel more" is a method that FrontStreet Coffee often mentions, and it's also the most recommended one. To quickly distinguish the aromas in coffee, we first need to build a sufficiently rich "aroma library" in our minds. Only then can we identify its type the moment we encounter this aroma. Without sufficient content to support our perception, any flavor will inevitably be unfamiliar to you, and you'll subconsciously think that this cup of coffee only has sourness, bitterness, or just a general coffee flavor.

How to Identify Flavors in Coffee?

In the beginning, FrontStreet Coffee recommends drinking more while using a flavor wheel to visualize flavors based on their taste and aroma. In response to friends' requests, FrontStreet Coffee has found a clearer version (actually AI-enhanced). Click on the image to save it directly~

The flavor wheel consists of three rings: the inner ring is the category outline - you can think of them as the level of Arabica, Robusta, and Liberica, representing general broad categories; the middle ring is the subcategories subdivided from the broad categories of the inner ring; the outer ring is the final ring of specific items under the subcategories, which are the concrete flavors we perceive. Once we understand their corresponding relationships, the use of this flavor wheel becomes easy to understand!

For example, when we taste a relatively sweet flavor in coffee, we can start from the sweet category in the inner ring of the flavor wheel and gradually refine until we find the corresponding concrete food. Is this sweetness accompanied by aroma, or is it just plain sweetness? If it's sweet with aroma, then we can move toward the brown sugar category in the middle ring for further subdivision! Then, if it carries a toasted aroma, combined with the taste, it can be a caramel flavor; if this aroma has honey notes and the texture is relatively rich, then we can categorize its flavor as "honey." (For comprehensive application of the flavor wheel, you can refer to the article "Detailed Guide to Using the Flavor Wheel" - FrontStreet Coffee won't elaborate too much here~)

In addition to the flavor wheel, there are other auxiliary tools to help us enhance flavor perception~ such as "aroma bottles," but because the price of aroma bottles is quite... well, you know, FrontStreet Coffee still recommends using the flavor wheel while drinking more, smelling more, and feeling more~

Of course, the flavor wheel contains limited flavors, and there are many foods in China that don't exist abroad, so they won't be included in the flavor wheel. If you experience flavors in coffee that don't exist in the flavor wheel, don't worry - it's not that your sense of smell or taste is problematic, but rather that these flavors exist but simply aren't included in the flavor wheel~

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

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473