Is Inability to Taste Coffee Flavors Always a Palate Problem? Why Strong Coffee Makes Flavors Harder to Perceive

Sometimes, not being able to taste the flavors in coffee might not be because you haven't grasped the essence. It could also be due to some factors in the brewing process that prevent the flavors from having adequate room to express themselves, making them too subtle for you to perceive.

Factors That Hinder Coffee Flavor Expression

Great! Today, FrontStreet Coffee will share some factors that can hinder the "expression" of coffee flavors. You can refer to these to see which pitfalls you might have encountered, and make targeted improvements!

1. Excessive Concentration

When we pursue high-concentration coffee for the sake of texture, we can easily encounter situations where coffee flavors are not distinct. To extract high-concentration coffee means increasing the coffee-to-water ratio and reducing the amount of hot water injected, allowing more coffee substances to be present in the same weight of liquid! While this can give coffee higher concentration and a richer texture, it also means that coffee substances become more concentrated, as this is equivalent to compressing the space where substances exist, thus achieving higher concentration.

For those who don't often drink strong coffee, it becomes relatively difficult to distinguish coffee flavors immediately when concentration is too high. When concentration is too concentrated, our taste buds and olfactory nerves find it difficult to clearly identify each flavor, so they simply mix all flavors together and transmit them as a package to the brain. As a result, some coffee flavors are easily overlooked due to insufficient prominence. To make an analogy, it's like trying to find a specific friend in a crowded scene. Therefore, when drinking coffee, if you find it difficult to detect flavors when the coffee first enters your mouth, but instead notice that the flavors that come back after swallowing are very prominent, then this situation is most likely due to the coffee being too concentrated.

If you find such a cup of coffee difficult to swallow due to excessive concentration, or feel that you're missing some joy because you can't perceive the flavors, you can choose to add 10-20ml of hot water to dilute the concentration. This will give the flavors more room to express themselves, making them easier for us to perceive!

2. Over-extraction!

If we use high extraction efficiency when brewing coffee, we can easily release undesirable bitterness, astringency, and miscellaneous flavors - simply put, this is over-extraction! Whether it's bitterness or miscellaneous flavors, they possess very high "expressiveness" and can easily mask the characteristics of other positive flavors. Therefore, when coffee is over-extracted, flavors become difficult to perceive due to the emergence of negative tastes.

In such situations, FrontStreet Coffee doesn't need to say much - everyone can think of how to solve it! Water temperature, grind size, coffee-to-water ratio, time, and brewing technique are all controllable extraction parameters. When extraction efficiency is too high, we only need to slightly adjust the values of certain parameters to reduce the occurrence of over-extraction!

3. Beans Too Fresh

As we all know, freshly roasted coffee beans not only contain huge amounts of carbon dioxide but also make the coffee itself have a certain dryness, affecting our experience. If a cup of coffee has weak and unremarkable flavors, and leaves a throat-catching sensation after drinking, it's very likely due to the coffee beans being too fresh.

In such situations, pre-grinding or bean resting are both good degassing options! FrontStreet Coffee would recommend bean resting more, as this can significantly reduce instability during brewing.

4. Using Tap Water to Brew Coffee

Recently, tap water has been mentioned quite frequently! This is because water quality indeed has a significant impact on coffee extraction. Water quality refers to the mineral content in the water. Water containing appropriate amounts of minerals helps extract coffee flavor compounds, but excessive amounts can actually hinder extraction, resulting in brewed coffee with indistinct flavors, thin texture, and hollowness. The mineral content in tap water in most regions is relatively high. When we use these unfiltered tap water for brewing, it reduces the extracted flavor compounds. If there aren't many flavor compounds in the coffee to begin with, it's naturally difficult to perceive them through tasting.

Therefore, generally speaking, the water used for brewing coffee still needs attention! Self-formulated water, mineral water sold in supermarkets, or installing a filtration system for tap water can all effectively improve this problem~

That's all for now! You can use this as reference. If there are any factors that FrontStreet Coffee hasn't pointed out, you can also send private messages in the backend, and we'll definitely follow up next time!

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FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473