Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Salty, Umami: Does Coffee Contain Umami? Why Can't You Taste Umami in Coffee? How to Experience Coffee Flavors?

When we describe the flavors of food, sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami, our tongues rely on different receptors to perceive and tell them apart. With coffee, however, people generally focus on acidity, sweetness, bitterness and saltiness. These four are also the flavors most easily tasted and detected in a cup.

As specialty coffee has developed and spread, the language of flavor description has grown richer. Now and then the adjective "umami" turns up in the industry, becoming a selling point for certain coffees. FrontStreet Coffee once saw "umami" printed on a bag of Panama Geisha beans, which naturally raises the question: can umami really be tasted in coffee?

What Is Umami?

Professor Kikunae Ikeda of Tokyo Imperial University in Japan is regarded as the first person to describe umami as an independent concept. In 1908 he revealed the scientific essence of umami from the microscopic world. The story goes that he noticed a very distinctive flavor in a broth and felt certain there must be a "flavor molecule" behind it. After a long process of research, extraction and separation, he found that umami came from free glutamic acid, and he succeeded in isolating the molecule he had first guessed at, glutamic acid, from kelp.

For a long time umami remained a fairly abstract idea. The English word itself evolved from the Japanese terms umai, meaning delicious, and mi, meaning taste. As a result, for many years people simply described umami as a delicious flavor.

As the fifth basic taste, umami is usually associated with foods cooked from ingredients such as meat, fish, shellfish and certain fungi and plants. Unlike sour, sweet, bitter and salty, it typically cannot be perceived clearly and quickly, which places it among the more complex flavor perceptions.

Can Coffee Have Umami?

Scientific research shows that all foods contain some glutamates, coffee included. For taste receptors to identify a given flavor, however, the number of molecules must reach a certain threshold. That means umami molecules would need to approach the numbers of sour, sweet, bitter and other tastes before umami could truly be experienced in coffee.

In reality, the glutamic acid content of raw coffee beans is extremely low. Our taste receptors simply cannot identify flavor molecules at such low concentrations in coffee. So those who claim to taste umami in coffee are clearly not experiencing the result of free glutamic acid, but rather a flavor assembled through the combined action of smell and taste. To some extent this umami is more a taste illusion than a flavor that truly exists.

When we taste coffee, smell and taste interact, and smell plays an important role in flavor perception. Smell has two stages: orthonasal olfaction, smelling through the nose, and retronasal olfaction, smelling through the mouth. When the concrete aroma delivered by retronasal olfaction makes us think of very sweet food, we subconsciously feel the cup is high in sweetness. In the same way, those who "taste umami" most likely associate certain aromas and mouthfeel in coffee with their impression of umami, and so generate the perception of it.

Understanding How Umami Appears in Coffee

As noted earlier, compared with the easily identified sweet, bitter, sour and salty tastes, umami is hard for our taste buds to distinguish on its own. More often it is a complex, intertwined flavor, which is why we describe certain delicious foods with terms such as umami-sweet and salty-umami. Some people even believe umami is simply a form of saltiness, because the two so often appear together.

Back to coffee tasting: the "culprit" behind the umami illusion is most likely saltiness. When brewing light roast coffee, if extraction is insufficient or the concentration is too high, it is easy to taste saltiness. The reason is that the sweet substances in the coffee fail to be released or are masked, while acidity takes up a large share. Such coffee often tastes salty-sour on entry, and that is then mistaken for umami. The test is simple: add a small amount of water to dilute the coffee and see whether the salty taste disappears.

What is more, as the industry keeps developing, more players are entering coffee and every segment is branching out in finer detail. People are no longer confined to the vocabulary of the traditional flavor wheel but describe their black coffee in more open and novel ways, and umami is one of them. Although the probability of genuine umami appearing in coffee is very low, almost zero, people still choose such a moreish word to describe it, signaling that the coffee gives the taster an excellent taste comparable to umami.

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FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you want to chase that elusive umami-like impression, the coffees most often described with it are Geishas, and the estate that made the variety famous is Panama's Hacienda La Esmeralda. Its owner discovered the Geisha growing there in 2003 and entered it in the Best of Panama competition, where an average cupping score of 94.6 broke the event's record and made Geisha the most sought-after variety in the world overnight.

At the top of that lineup sits FrontStreet Panama Esmeralda Red Label Geisha, whose official name is Esmeralda Special. It grows at 1600 to 1800 meters, and every lot must cup above 90 points, carries its own lot number, and comes from a single small plot, such as the Harimiyo plot for FrontStreet's Red Label. For an easier entry to the same style, FrontStreet Panama Boquete Geisha is a genuine washed Geisha from Panama's most representative specialty region, offering the classic honeyed citrus, oolong-tea texture and delicate fruit acidity at a far more accessible price.

If it is the Ethiopian expression of the variety you are after, FrontStreet Grana Gesha comes from a processing station at the border of Kochere and Grana Abaya, established in 2014 and managed by Mr. Israel Degefa, where the surrounding coffee area covers as many as 700 hectares. Hand-picked fully ripe cherries are dried on raised beds for 14 to 20 days depending on the weather, and a light-to-medium roast brings out bright citrus acidity, elegant ginger-lily aromatics and the ripe-fruit sweetness typical of the Geisha lineage.