Advancing for Coffee Beginners: 3 Steps to Teach You How to Appreciate Single-Origin Coffee

Understanding Coffee Tasting: A Comprehensive Guide

Taste perception is actually a hybrid sensory experience that combines multiple factors from our body: taste, smell, touch, vision (research shows that vision can cause taste bias), and hearing (your taste perception is easily influenced by others' subjective opinions). While there are many authoritative standards for measuring coffee quality, we have simplified these to help beginners understand coffee more quickly. To briefly summarize, for coffee beginners tasting a cup of coffee, there are three steps: how to appreciate a single-origin coffee?

Step 1: Aroma

Dry Aroma: Bring freshly ground coffee close to your nose and mouth, and you'll perceive the different dry aromas from various coffee origins. For example, in Latin American coffees, you'll smell nutty and dark chocolate-like notes, while African coffees often feature floral and fruit-like flavors.

Wet Aroma: Pour the brewed coffee into a cup, close your eyes, and slowly smell its wet aroma. You might detect nutty, chocolate, fruity, or floral scents.

Another major misconception when tasting food is that the tongue cannot actually distinguish smells; only when food aromas enter your nasal cavity can you fully perceive the taste of food.

Poor Quality: Industrial flavoring smells, decayed odors, earthy notes, etc.

High Quality: The coffee's aroma contains rich notes such as wine, floral, and fruit. Whether it's the dry aroma of coffee grounds or the wet aroma after brewing, it will provide you with an olfactory enjoyment.

Step 2: Flavor

When coffee enters your mouth, you can feel its flavor. Many enthusiasts, especially those just beginning to explore coffee tasting, often think that coffee doesn't taste as good as it smells. Indeed, distinguishing flavors in coffee liquid orally requires some practice, but over time, the various flavors can be detected.

Another key point in coffee tasting is how to distinguish the sweetness, saltiness, acidity, and bitterness of coffee.

Body is what we commonly call "body," referring to the mature, mellow, and rich taste expressed by coffee liquid. The difference between a glass of water and a cup of coffee lies in the fact that water has no taste and isn't viscous, while espresso is rich in oils and has good thickness. A coffee with good body will allow the aroma to linger longer in the mouth, with a more extended aftertaste.

Body not only affects your overall coffee experience but also influences the completeness of aromatic compound release in coffee. Most cuppers or consumers cannot clearly specify which mouthfeels are good and which are bad, but at least you know which ones you like and which ones you don't. In my opinion, the judgment of coffee body varies from person to person.

Sweetness

Poor Quality: Bitter melon, overly bitter and astringent

High Quality: Sweet, similar to sucrose, brown sugar, caramel, with a mouth-watering sensation

Tasting Notes: Coffee with sweetness is like a fruit, containing fructose within coffee beans. Even a cup of black coffee will present a sweet taste behind the acidity or bitterness. Additionally, different coffee beans have varying degrees of aftertaste sweetness; there's no good or bad, only personal preference. However, if the aftertaste is too dry and astringent, it indicates poor coffee bean quality.

Cleanliness

Poor Quality: Many mixed flavors

High Quality: Pure and fresh taste

Tasting Notes: In fact, the astringency of coffee doesn't need to be eliminated but rather suppressed, and the degree of suppression varies according to individual preferences. Flavors that are rather chaotic or mixed with undesirable negative tastes are not sufficiently clean.

Bitterness

Poor Quality: Bitterness at the root of the tongue, coarse "bitterness"

High Quality: Dark chocolate-like bitterness

Tasting Notes: Specialty coffee doesn't have simple "bitterness." Generally, we roughly use "bitterness" to describe the pleasant bitterness among nutty, dark chocolate, and caramel flavors.

Acidity

Poor Quality: Rotten sourness, sharp acidity, very high acidity, mouth-puckering, vinegar-like

High Quality: Fruity acidity, fresh acidity, rounded acidity, gentle acidity

Tasting Notes: "Sweetness is easy, good acidity is rare." The acidity in quality coffee should be contained within the coffee, not obvious and sharp. Quality coffee often contains large amounts of organic acidic substances, embodying rich acidic notes like citrus and berries. The quality of acidity is an important factor in specialty coffee.

Saltiness

Tasting Notes: Actually, saltiness comes in many forms. Aroma can make people think of heavily salted foods, such as the smell of stir-fried dishes with too much salt, as well as the smell at the bottom of the cup after drinking coffee, which smells salty, reminiscent of salty snacks like shrimp crackers and Wang Wang Senbei, and so on. In terms of mouthfeel, it's generally the taste of salt.

When making pour-over and espresso occasionally, you can taste and "smell" [saltiness] (smell refers to the aroma after grinding), and most of the time, saltiness is more obvious in Espresso.

Due to taste distribution, acidity and saltiness are easily confused, and poor acidity is difficult to distinguish from saltiness. But it's still different from the saltiness of salt. Of course, some beans have exceptionally obvious saltiness, very close to the saltiness of sea salt.

Step 3: Perceiving the Aftertaste

The final point of tasting is the aftertaste, which refers to the lingering sensation that coffee brings in the mouth and throat. After drinking coffee, there's always a flavor that returns from the throat. Some aftertastes are long-lasting and clear, while others are brief and vague. We say that relatively long-lasting and clear aftertastes are good, indicating higher quality of coffee green beans.

Single-origin coffees from different origins have different flavors, which is the charm that enables coffee to continue developing endlessly. Coffees from different regions have different flavors, making coffee from around the world a rich garden of taste.

Acidity

【Honey Language】(Washed Light Roast)

Recommendation Reason: Ethiopian Washed Sidamo G1 Micro-lot

Flavor: Wild ginger flower, bergamot, blackcurrant, rich aromas of various tropical fruits

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【Panama Butterfly】70% Geisha Content

Recommendation Reason: 70% Geisha content, extremely high cost-performance ratio

Flavor: Tea aroma, honey, berries, classic Emerald Manor Geisha taste

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Bitterness

【Indonesia Sumatra Golden Mandheling】

Recommendation Reason: Rich body, the sweetness and cleanliness of Golden Mandheling, and its rich, wild spice flavors are slightly superior to G1, which is one of the reasons why Golden Mandheling is more expensive than G1.

Flavor: Toasted bread, nuts, pine, caramel, herbs

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Sweetness

【Costa Rica Black Honey】

Recommendation Reason: High sweetness

Flavor: Preserved plum, honey, brown sugar

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【Candlelight】(Natural Light Roast)

Recommendation Reason: The processing is a specialty of 90+, where these coffees are separated by variety, microclimate, and harvest timing, tasted one by one, with processing methods specifically designed for each flavor profile to achieve a taste characteristic, like the design of big brands, meticulously researched and crafted with effort to complete a work close to art.

Flavor: Berries, floral notes, grapes, rich aromas of various tropical fruits

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The Final Most Scientific Method Is:

Drink coffee,

Drink coffee,

And... drink coffee!

Important Notice :

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