Latest SCAA Coffee Flavor Wheel Chinese Version: High-Definition Wallpaper Download and Detailed Explanation

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The Coffee Flavor Wheel: A Revolutionary Update

The Coffee Flavor Wheel stands as one of the coffee industry's most precious resources. This marks the first update in the 21 years since the SCAA Coffee Flavor Wheel's creation. The foundation of this update stems from the collaboration between the World Coffee Research organization and SCAA, through which many professional sensory panel members, scientists, coffee buyers, and roasting companies have collectively joined this update effort. This represents the largest and most collaborative coffee flavor wheel research to date, inspiring a series of new vocabulary for both industry and professional discourse. This groundbreaking new tool will transform how our specialty coffee industry utilizes the coffee flavor wheel.

A Quick Refresher on the Original Coffee Flavor Wheel

So, the new coffee flavor wheel has arrived—are you ready? Not quite? No problem! Let's first review the old coffee flavor wheel together!

Friends who love specialty coffee should be familiar with this SCAA flavor wheel, but many find it difficult to understand. Today, let's briefly explain the structure and meaning behind the flavor wheel!

The old flavor wheel was divided into two sections: negative flavors on the left and regular flavors on the right.

Understanding Negative Flavors

Let's first discuss the left side. You can see that the flavor descriptions on the left are all rather unpleasant, and the flavor wheel directly categorizes these undesirable flavors. How do these flavors arise? Actually, there are many reasons that affect flavor and mouthfeel in coffee, leading to unpleasant tastes—from the harvesting of coffee cherries to post-processing, green bean storage, and roasting. Each stage impacts the final flavor. For example, failing to remove rotten or unripe cherries during harvest, over-fermentation or improper drying temperatures during post-processing, hygiene conditions and humidity during green bean storage, inappropriate roasting degrees or methods—all these factors can create undesirable flavors that affect a cup of coffee's taste. The old flavor wheel provided detailed classification and descriptions of negative flavors that occur in many situations.

Understanding Positive Flavors

Now let's look at the right side of the old flavor wheel. The right side is mainly divided into mouthfeel and aroma, with further extensions from these two main categories. Mouthfeel is primarily categorized into sour, sweet, bitter, and salty. These four sensory perceptions originate from the taste buds in our mouth. Further extensions include the intensity and comfort of these four taste bud sensations. The aroma on the right side is much richer than mouthfeel because aroma is perceived through our sense of smell, and as we should know, our nose can perceive far more than our taste buds. Aroma is absolutely thousands of times more complex than taste. When we usually talk about the "taste" of an apple, we're actually referring to what our nose perceives, while the sweetness of the apple is what our taste buds perceive. If you're interested in this type of sensory science, I recommend a book to everyone called "The Flavor Hunters"—you should check it out!

Introducing the New Coffee Flavor Wheel

Now let's discuss the new version of the flavor wheel. If you look closely, it has changed from two separate diagrams in the old version to a single circle. In comparison, many of the negative flavor descriptions from the left side of the old flavor wheel no longer appear in the new version. Many new flavors have also been added. That's right—we can play a game of "spot the difference" between the new and old versions. We've discovered these added flavors: strawberry, blueberry, raspberry, chamomile, jasmine, grapefruit, lime, coconut, pineapple, cherry, pomegranate, grape, peach, pear, black tea, vanilla, olive oil, raw, fresh, under ripe, dark green vegetables (similar to broccoli, kale, spinach), peapod, herb like, and many more.

It's clear that the new flavor wheel has added many fruit-based descriptions. In fact, these descriptions were already in use before the flavor wheel update. The newly added raw and plant-like adjectives might be flavor descriptions derived from some of the extremely light roasts popular today, which we also frequently hear people using in our daily conversations. This globally recognized common language of the coffee industry naturally updates and adjusts according to industry advances and trends.

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