What is Coffee Flavor? How Many Types of Coffee Flavors Are There? What Does Coffee Flavor Mean? What is Specialty Coffee?

The Origin and Evolution of Coffee Flavor Descriptions

Flavor descriptions emerged as a product of the specialty coffee concept. When people began to realize that coffee no longer tasted uniformly bitter and burnt, they started optimizing every aspect of coffee "preparation." They attempted to experience richer, more delicate flavors in the final cup of coffee.

In coffee shops, there's always a group of people who gather together, vividly describing the various flavors they've just experienced from a cup of "specialty coffee." Perhaps some flavors are too enticing, inevitably attracting some "outsiders" (those who drink coffee solely for caffeine's stimulating effects) to order a cup, wanting to experience this splendid and colorful specialty world themselves.

However, when they taste the same coffee, they discover that this so-called coffee with rich floral notes and explosive fruity flavors tastes only sour or bitter. This naturally leads to imagination: Could it be that the coffee they drank is different from mine? Did they consume something that gave them hallucinations? Can a single coffee have so many flavors?

Are Coffee Flavors Real?

To find the answer to this question, we need to first understand what coffee flavor actually is! So-called coffee flavor refers to the specific tastes we perceive in coffee that also exist in other foods. For example, we often mention when drinking coffee: white floral notes, citrus flavors, strawberry flavors, and so on. But this actually creates a major misunderstanding for many people—that these coffee flavors are perceived solely through taste buds on the tongue.

In reality, this is not the case. Our tongues can only perceive five basic tastes: sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and umami. The strawberry and citrus flavors we perceive in coffee mainly come from the aromas released when coffee enters the mouth, including the "sweetness" we perceive from the coffee. These aromas are captured by our sense of smell through the nasal passages in our mouth, combined with tastes from taste buds, which then stimulate our associations with specific flavors. If we hold our noses while eating or drinking, besides the five basic tastes of sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and umami, you'll find it difficult to perceive other flavors.

The Science Behind Coffee Flavors

Many readers might think at this point that coffee flavors are merely imagination, not truly existing. This phenomenon actually occurs frequently in the daily lives of coffee professionals: many friends initially don't perceive coffee flavors, but immediately taste the same flavors in the coffee after receiving flavor descriptions from others or from flavor cards. Then many people think this is just psychological suggestion, not truly tasting the flavors, simply "deceiving" themselves. Regarding this question, FrontStreet Coffee wants to say that coffee flavors are not casually made up~ As everyone knows, green coffee beans contain over 200 aromatic compounds, and after roasting into mature beans, they transform into thousands of aromatic compounds. Here's the key point: research shows that most of these aroma substances produced after roasting can also be found in other entities (plants, foods, spices, etc.) with the same aromatic compounds.

This applies not only to coffee but to all other entities as well. The apple flavor we perceive from apples and the orange flavor we perceive from oranges are actually aromas emitted by these foods that are perceived by our sense of smell. Let me give a more understandable example: the orange smell we encounter when peeling an orange actually comes from d-limonene hidden in the orange peel's aroma. It's this compound that makes us perceive the so-called "orange flavor." So we can understand that it's not that oranges have orange flavor, but that oranges have orange aroma. And because among coffee's thousands of aromatic compounds, there are also aromatic compounds like d-limonene, we can taste similar flavors from coffee.

Why Similar Flavors Vary Between Individuals

Why do we say "similar"? Because we need to understand that a single scent is not composed of just one aromatic component. Just like the single colors we see in daily life, although they appear as one color, they are actually combinations of other colors. There's a saying that goes: if you master the three primary colors, you can create any color! The same applies to flavors. However, the difference is that colors can be categorized, but aromas cannot. Even the same d-limonene will combine with different other aromas to create different tastes. And different people have varying abilities to perceive flavors, so even the same taste can evoke different specific flavor associations in different people. Taking d-limonene as another example: some people, having experienced this aroma from orange peels, will identify it as orange flavor. Others, having experienced this aroma from lemon peels, will identify it as lemon flavor.

The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel

Everyone expresses their own opinions, completely unable to reach consensus, which creates significant barriers to communication. Therefore, in 1995, SCAA released the first version of the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel. The birth of the flavor wheel provided organization for baristas, enabling them to better understand the aromatic flavors they perceived through the wheel.

This version of the flavor wheel had two parts: one for positive flavors and one for negative flavors. Because it was targeted at baristas, ordinary people might find it somewhat difficult to understand. However, with the gradual improvement of coffee quality, coupled with the difficulty of understanding this set of flavor wheels, SCAA released a completely new Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel in 2016. This version removed most negative flavors and was more easy to understand, making it accessible not only to baristas but also to beginners. (For instructions on using the flavor wheel, you can refer to today's second article~)

Coffee Flavor as Cultural Communication

With this foundation, coffee flavor description became a communication standard for discussing coffee quality. Specialty coffee itself pursues higher coffee quality and culture, and flavor description恰好 makes coffee flavors more concrete, forming a type of coffee culture. We can experience the presence of other flavors while drinking coffee, sparking imagination—it's simply too delightful. So we can understand that coffee flavors are not mystical, but a scientifically-based existence. However, as mentioned at the beginning, many friends don't perceive coffee flavors initially because the aroma threshold isn't sufficient, so we cannot quickly identify them. Careful tasting is needed to perceive the main type of that aroma.

Developing Flavor Perception Skills

Distinguishing flavors also requires technique and experience, as it's not an innate skill. Even if we can clearly perceive aromas and tastes, if we haven't eaten foods with similar flavors or don't have deep impressions of those foods, it's difficult to identify those food flavors when drinking coffee. Therefore, there are currently some coffee sensory courses on the market that teach you methods to organize and record flavors, laying an important foundation for flavor identification.

In the end, to improve one's flavor perception ability, it still comes down to what FrontStreet Coffee often says: drink more, smell more, and feel more. There's a sentence in "The Science of Coffee Aroma" that FrontStreet Coffee particularly likes: no matter what field or what it is, to achieve reproducibility, we must go through a process of simple repetition over a period of time—even experts in various industries do the same. Because simple repetition creates depth; even with things we're already familiar with, we must go through simple repetition to grasp their essence and notice subtle differences. Our standards consequently rise, and our skills grow accordingly. Even highly creative artists need to repeatedly train and practice basic techniques. So while coffee flavor tasting isn't extremely difficult, it's not as simple as one might imagine~

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