What Are Coffee Tasting Methods? How to Appreciate a Good Cup of Coffee? How to Taste Pour-Over Coffee?

For us as consumers, whether a cup of coffee tastes good mainly depends on whether its flavor matches our personal preferences. We can evaluate a cup of coffee with strong subjective perspectives.

If the first sip makes you want to continue drinking, then that coffee is a good cup for you. However, if its flavor doesn't align with your preferences, then even if others say it's good, you'll label it as not good.

However, if you want to seriously evaluate whether a cup of coffee is good or bad, you need to reduce your subjective perspective and try to balance subjectivity with objectivity, examining the coffee from multiple different angles, just like the judges at major coffee competitions. You should approach it with a "critical eye" to find the shortcomings of a coffee rather than relying on whether its flavor matches your personal preferences. For example, if the coffee performs well in all aspects without any shortcomings, then even if you subjectively don't like this coffee, you cannot let this subjective factor influence your overall judgment. And this, there's a specialized term for it, which is "cupping" or "coffee tasting."

I wonder if friends have noticed that FrontStreet Coffee often uses the phrase "coffee tasting" rather than "drinking coffee" when describing the experience of having a single-origin coffee in their articles. Many friends might think this description is meant to add a sense of sophistication. In fact, well... it's not entirely like that...

"Coffee tasting" means to taste and identify, different from drinking coffee. The reason we use the term "tasting" when drinking single-origin coffee is that besides flavor, we need to analyze its quality from other perspectives. So what standards should be used to determine whether a coffee tastes good, and how should it be evaluated?

FrontStreet Coffee has integrated the Cup of Excellence cupping form and believes we can examine coffee from these aspects! Of course, we don't need to specifically conduct cupping, as it's not necessary for most friends. So when making coffee in our daily routine, we can try to observe and examine that cup of coffee from the following perspectives.

Aroma

After grinding coffee beans into powder, the first thing we need to experience is its aroma. The thousands of aromas produced by roasting are trapped within the beans, and when the whole bean structure is broken down, these aromas rush out. At this moment, it's the best time to experience these aromas. With proper roasting, the aroma of most beans is very pleasant. Generally, light-roasted beans emit fruit, floral, or slight toasted bread aromas; dark-roasted beans emit spice, chocolate, pine, and roasted nut flavors, and if roasted very dark, we can also smell the oils that have overflowed from the bean surface.

What was mentioned earlier is the dry aroma of the coffee powder. When we use hot water to brew this coffee powder, we can have a second olfactory experience and feel its wet aroma. Compared to dry aroma, wet aroma doesn't have as rich expression. But we can still smell some aromas. For example, light-roasted coffee emits elegant floral aromas or sweet and sour dried fruit aromas; dark-roasted coffee emits roasted nuts, hazelnuts, caramel chocolate, and other aromas.

The richness of aroma mainly depends on the content of substances in the beans. When the beans contain more substances, the aroma will be more abundant. And when we cannot detect obvious aromas in this experience, or perceive many uncomfortable smells, then subconsciously, we will think that this coffee won't perform very well, meaning it will receive a low score. It should be noted that because the experience of aroma lacks the assistance of taste, it's harder for us to associate specific flavors. So regarding olfactory experience, because it cannot be shared through words, one can only rely on continuous smelling and accumulation to improve skill levels.

Acidity

In the article from the past two days, FrontStreet Coffee emphasized that acidity refers to the quality of acid, not the intensity of acid. The balance of sweet, sour, and bitter is fundamental to a cup of coffee. If the acidity is too strong or the bitterness is too prominent, then this coffee will be directly passed over. Returning to acidity, when we taste coffee, if the coffee's acid gives you a feeling of very pleasant fresh fruit acidity, then we can understand that this coffee has good acidity quality. And often this type of acid will be described by us as "lively acidity" or "mellow acidity" based on its performance.

If the acidity of this coffee makes you feel uncomfortable, with some spoiled acidic flavors similar to over-fermentation, or vinegar-like acidity, then it can be defined as negative acidity. Corresponding descriptions include: "spoiled acid," "vinegar acid," and "sharp acid."

Of course, these descriptions are limited to light-roasted coffees. Dark-roasted coffees like Mandheling don't perceive acidity, so naturally, there's no need to experience acidity quality!

Sweetness

Whether it's light-roasted acidic coffee or dark-roasted bitter coffee, we can perceive the sweetness contained within. However, this sweetness isn't simply perceived by taste buds like sugar, but needs to be combined with olfaction to be perceived together.

Because the sugar content in coffee has been mostly broken down during the roasting process, the sweetness in coffee isn't like what we normally understand as sweet. (This also requires us to drink more and perceive more to understand)

Naturally, the degree of sweetness is the more the better, after all, sweetness can make the brain secrete dopamine, making us feel happy! This is also true for coffee. Therefore, coffee with higher sweetness is naturally better.

Mouthfeel

Besides olfaction and taste, when tasting a cup of coffee, we also need to use touch. The reason we need to use touch is that we need to feel the texture of the coffee, simply called mouthfeel. This requires us to use the touch of our mouth and tongue to experience.

There are two aspects that need to be perceived by touch: one is the "body" of the coffee, and the other is the smoothness of the coffee. Coffee "body" refers to the weight of the coffee, similar to the experience of drinking yogurt, where we can clearly feel the heavy texture of yogurt. Smoothness refers to whether the coffee has a delicate, silky experience when drunk. If a coffee feels very silky in texture and has substance, then we will use words like mellow, smooth, solid, and full to praise and describe it based on its performance.

However, if the texture of this coffee is as thin as water or very rough, then even if this coffee performs well in the previous aspects, our impression of it will be greatly diminished.

Cleanliness

If the coffee we drink doesn't make us feel those unpleasant off-flavors and has distinct layers, then we will describe this coffee as very clean! High cleanliness!

However, if it carries some flavors that shouldn't appear in normal coffee, such as: earthy, woody, medicinal, rubber, burnt bitterness, astringency, and other flavors that affect the expression of other flavors. Then, this coffee will not receive a high evaluation due to poor cleanliness.

Aftertaste

Aftertaste is the last aspect we need to experience after swallowing coffee.

After we swallow the coffee, close our mouth, and exhale aroma through our nose, so we can experience the aftertaste of the coffee. The strength and duration of the aroma we smell are our criteria for judgment. When the aroma is more obvious and the aftertaste lasts longer, the performance of this coffee is more excellent, and vice versa~

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