Astringency
Astringency is a term that describes a drying or puckering sensation in your mouth. Many people mistake this sensation for bitterness, but the two are distinct. In fact, when you experience astringency, certain molecules are binding to your tongue and causing a drying feeling. You may be more familiar with the astringency in red wine and tea, which is caused by compounds called polyphenols (tannins are well-recognized polyphenol compounds in tea and wine). Coffee also contains polyphenols, which likely contribute to its astringency. Two polyphenols that are often linked to astringency in coffee are chlorogenic acids (see page 186) and dicaffeoylquinic acid. Caffeine may also play a role. Too much astringency in coffee is unpleasant and may be a sign of overextraction.
AROMA
Ah, the smell of freshly brewed coffee. So distinct! So beloved! Even people who don’t like to drink coffee often enjoy the warm, comforting embrace of its aroma. Aroma is the counterpart to taste and is thus essential to coffee’s flavor; you can’t have flavor without aroma. As anyone who has had a stuffed-up nose can attest, our senses of smell and taste are inextricably linked, which means aroma plays an important role in the character of our coffee.
Aroma isn’t just what you smell when you bend down and take a big whiff of your steaming cuppa joe. Retronasal olfaction, smelling that happens from inside your mouth, is incredibly important when it comes to tasting flavors in coffee (or flavors in anything). Nasal congestion diminishes this kind of smelling, which is why food often tastes bland when you have a cold. When you take a sip of coffee, hundreds of volatile aromatics are bouncing around in your mouth and making their way to the back of your throat and up into your nose. Once detected by your olfactory system, the aroma, along with the taste and mouthfeel, helps your brain discern and log flavors.
You may notice that coffee professionals often slurp their coffee when they taste it. This is meant to aerate the coffee so that it hits the entire palate at once and gets the nose involved quickly. (Without slurping, the coffee will hit the front part of the tongue first and then hit the back on its way down.) Is slurping necessary for you? Probably not, but it’s kind of fun to try!
Professional baristas are often trained to detect nuances in aroma at different stages of the coffee life cycle, from when the beans are freshly ground to after the coffee is swallowed. When training employees and wholesale customers, Andreas uses a product called Le Nez du Café, which contains 36 unmarked vials of different aromas that are commonly found in coffee. To use it, you smell each vial and try to identify its aroma. The goal is both to introduce you to the aromas most often found in coffee and to train your nose to identify those aromas. Why? Well, it’s incredibly difficult to identify a scent or flavor in coffee if you’ve never smelled or tasted it before! I’ve tried Le Nez du Café and was able to correctly identify only a few scents—those related to items I’d been exposed to the most.
Retronasal Olfaction Action
One fun way to better understand how retronasal olfaction works is to purposefully exhale through your nose after swallowing some coffee and compare what you taste to what you taste after inhaling. The difference should be quite distinct.
Aroma is determined by volatile aromatics, of which more than 800 have been identified in coffee. Although it’s unlikely that all of them contribute to that distinct coffee smell, there are a few broad categories to help you understand where coffee aromas come from:
•Enzymatic. These aromas originate in the coffee plant itself and are often described as floral, fruity, or herbal. This makes a lot of sense because coffee beans are technically the seeds of fruit.
•Browning. Browning aromas are the result of the Maillard reaction (see page 146) and the caramelization of sugars, both of which happen during roasting. These reactions are the same as those responsible for the delicious smell of baking bread. These mostly sweet aromas are often described as nutty, caramely, chocolaty, or malty, and they likely contribute to perceived sweetness in the cup.
•Dry distillation. If coffee beans get far enough along in the roasting process, parts of them will actually start to burn. The aromas associated with this burning are often described as wood, clove, pepper, or tobacco. It goes without saying that the longer the beans roast, the more present these aromas will be.
The ways that coffee beans are grown, processed, and roasted can all affect how aromatics present themselves in the cup, and there is no right or wrong combination. It’s worth emphasizing the volatile nature of coffee’s aromatic compounds: they disappear quickly at room temperature, which is a major reason why coffee can go stale so quickly.
HOW TO ASSESS FLAVOR
Flavor is where smell and taste come together. These two senses are so closely connected, it can be hard for us to differentiate smell from taste or taste from smell. One of the remarkable things about coffee is that such a simple seed can contain such depth and breadth of flavor across its species. Most coffee lovers have a detailed memory of the first time they sipped a coffee that surprised them. It’s a singular, startling moment in the life of a coffee drinker. For Andreas, it was when he was working at a midwestern coffee chain in 2010 and tasted one of their special offerings: it tasted exactly like Cap’n Crunch Crunch Berries cereal. For many of us, this experience fuels a lifelong obsession with replicating that moment of recognition. Yet, many flavors in coffee tend to be subtle and elusive to the point that some of us begin to doubt their existence. Notes of black plum and cardamom in my coffee, you say? I don’t think so.
Flavor can be a divisive subject, and esoteric flavor notes often build a wall between baristas and customers. But flavor is not objective. It’s dependent on a number of factors, including genetics and personal experience. Our genes influence the way we taste. They can cause some of us to be more sensitive to bitterness or make others of us think cilantro tastes like soap—some people even have more taste buds than the rest of us, which makes them more sensitive to flavors in general. Perhaps most important, when it comes to coffee at least, are our taste memories. If you’ve never tasted a black plum, for example, you’d be hard-pressed to identify that note in your coffee. When Andreas tasted a fruity, sugary cereal in his coffee, he was probably tasting notes of blueberry; however, he was more familiar with Crunch Berries, so that’s where his mind went.
Obviously, being able to identify flavors is not a requirement of enjoying coffee. If you drink coffee regularly, you’ll likely develop preferences for certain flavors and be able to identify them using your own terminology without much conscious thought—and it’s fine to draw the line there. But if you do want to learn how to consciously taste your coffee, it takes practice. Your palate is malleable and must be trained to be more sensitive. The more you taste and smell something, the more likely it is that you will be able to detect it in your coffee. Remember how I could identify only the few aromas in Le Nez du Café that were most familiar to me? The more familiar you are with tastes and smells in general, the better your chance of finding their subtle variations in your cup. Baristas and other coffee professionals have a leg up on the rest of us because they spend hours a day tasting coffee. Not only that but they also spend a lot of time comparing different coffees. It’s much easier to suss things out of coffee if you have multiple samples to compare with each other.
Of course, recognizing a flavor in a cup of coffee does not necessarily mean you’ll be able to articulate that idea to someone else. We’re back to the language barrier. If I say a coffee reminds me of my grandmother’s basement, that doesn’t help anyone who hasn’t been in my grandmother’s basement understand what that coffee tastes like. This type of communication gap happens between roasters and consumers all the time. I’ve seen roasters use flavor notes that are whimsically meaningless (“autumn breeze”) or deceivingly specific (“peanut brittle”). These ultimately leave customers confused because they don’t know what an autumn breeze is supposed to taste like, or disappointed because the coffee tastes nothing like a desse
rt. Too often, flavor notes don’t mean what they say and don’t say what they mean—and consumers’ expectations often aren’t set correctly in the first place.
That’s what I appreciate about the new and improved SCA Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel, which was developed to help coffee professionals, scientists, and coffee lovers describe the taste and smell of coffee in a common language. At the beginning of 2016, the SCA updated the wheel for the first time since 1995 to account for a growing body of research in sensory science. The new terms, which align with the Sensory Lexicon developed by World Coffee Research and Kansas State University’s Sensory Analysis Center, replace decades-old jargon from the previous wheel and are recognizable even to people who aren’t involved in the coffee industry. The Lexicon provides a catalog of physical references for the flavor notes (scientists call them flavor attributes) and aromas on the wheel, so anyone can replicate them at home and improve their taste and smell memories.
First and foremost, the Flavor Wheel offers an opportunity for roasters and consumers to get on the same page when describing flavor. Ideally, roasters would use the new Flavor Wheel’s descriptors to replace any obscure or misleading flavor notes on their packages. Flavor notes could become so standardized that two different coffees with “raisin” listed among their flavor notes would both taste like raisins—and the flavor could be measured by a common reference. This sounds obvious enough, but flavor notes have not yet reached this level of consistency, neither among coffee professionals nor between consumers and roasters. Unfortunately, not all roasters have adopted the Flavor Wheel yet, so the language barrier remains. But it serves as a reminder of the ideal: a world where any given flavor note would mean the same thing to everyone.
I should note that coffee professionals who use standardized language to describe flavor can taste the same cup of coffee blindly and each come up with the same flavor notes for it. I am in no way trying to imply that flavor notes are imaginary or something—there’s just no universal language we can use to talk about them. The wine industry is far more advanced in this area than the coffee industry. Sommeliers are trained to pick out characteristics in wine and communicate them in a very specific way that other professionals can understand immediately.
The new version of the Flavor Wheel can help consumers communicate about flavor as well. It is a great way for home coffee brewers to casually identify and explain the flavors in their coffee, as it provides the words needed to describe actual flavors based on mere impressions. In my example of the coffee that tastes like my grandmother’s basement, I could use the Flavor Wheel to find a description that more people would be able to understand, such as “musty” or “stale.” Changing my description from personal (my grandmother’s basement) to universal (musty) allows me to talk about that flavor, and part of the joy of coffee is being able to talk about it with other coffee enthusiasts.
Before using the Flavor Wheel for the first time, familiarize yourself with it, starting with the broadest categories in the center and working your way outward to the more detailed descriptors around the edge. Then, smell or taste your coffee with purpose. You can try to do this at every stage of your brew: after grinding the beans, while the coffee is brewing, and, of course, once the brew is in the cup. When tasting, move your tongue around and see whether you can detect any specific flavors.
If you smell or taste something familiar but can’t quite put your finger on it, go ahead and prompt yourself with the wheel. Again, start from the center with the general categories. Ask yourself questions like, “Does this taste like spices?” or “Does this smell sweet?” Pay attention to your first impressions, even if they don’t quite seem to make sense. If, like Andreas, you taste a sugary cereal, you might be able to match that to Sweet or Fruity or both. Once you think you have a flavor or aroma nailed down, double-check it by mindfully tasting your coffee again.
Welcome to Flavor Town
If you are really getting into this tasting thing, you can access the Sensory Lexicon on which the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel is based. It lists all of the flavor attributes with definitions and references, which identify real-world items that you can taste or smell to fine-tune your palate. A free download is available at worldcoffeeresearch.org.
Although, due to the constraints of publishing, this book reproduces it in shades and tints of brown, the original Flavor Wheel (see page 200) was designed so that people could use color to discern flavors. Using research, the wheel’s designers matched each flavor to the color most commonly associated with it. So, if you can’t find the right words but the coffee somehow reminds you of something green, there’s a good chance the flavors fit into the Vegetative category. The wheel is also designed so that you can be as specific as you want to be. Because of the way it is tiered, you can try to move outward into increasingly specific flavors and aromas—or not.
As you make your way through the wheel a second time, you might notice the different-sized gaps between the flavor attributes. Like the colors, these gaps have a purpose too. Flavors identified as being closely related to each other (e.g., raisin and prune) have the smallest gaps between them. A bigger gap, like that between peanuts and clove, means the two flavors are less related.
COFFEE TASTER’S FLAVOR WHEEL
The Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel was created using the Sensory Lexicon developed by World Coffee Research and is used with permission. All rights reserved, SCA and WCR. Find the full-color version at https://sca.coffee.
The Flavor Wheel, in my opinion, is a beautiful thing, and if roasters insist on putting flavor notes on bags, they should use the terms from the wheel so that coffee enthusiasts can understand them. However, you shouldn’t feel like you have to use it. If you still can’t taste any specific flavors in your coffee, even with the Flavor Wheel, then give up. Seriously. Who cares? Coffee is supposed to be enjoyable, and forcing your brain to find a flavor where you perceive none seems like an unfun exercise in futility to me.
Coffee-Tasting Party!
Honing your coffee-tasting skills is more fun with other people. If you’re having fun in a casual, relaxed environment with your coffee comrades, you’ll probably enjoy your brew that much more.
To kick off your coffee-tasting party, select two different kinds of coffee to taste and compare. You can select more than two kinds, but note that you’ll be trying to brew all of them around the same time, so things can spiral out of control fairly quickly (she did not say from experience). What two kinds should you choose? A washed coffee versus a naturally processed coffee is a classic choice, but you can also try two coffees from two different origins or two coffees from the same origin that were roasted at different levels or by different roasters or that were processed in different ways. The possibilities are endless!
Make sure you have a device (or two) big enough to serve your guests. You’ll likely need some kind of thermal carafe or thermos so you can brew both coffees and make sure they both stay warm. The key is to be able to taste the two coffees side by side. It’s easier to distinguish differences when comparing them in the moment, rather than relying on your memory. (Also, be sure to pick up some baked goods for, um, scientific purposes—I mean, there is probably a reason why coffee and doughnuts go so well together. If you’re trying to be pure about this, you’ll need to hold off on eating the baked goods until you’ve tasted both coffees with an unadulterated tongue—the baked goods will absolutely influence the taste. You probably already know this about coffee and delicious breakfast food, but it’s kind of mind-blowing to consciously taste coffee both before and after eating a doughnut.)
Tip
If you don’t want to mess around with making coffee for the tasting party, you can just go to a craft coffee shop and get two different kinds of brewed coffee. Just make sure to put each in a thermos so that they stay hot until your guests arrive. This is perhaps not what you were expecting in a book about manually making coffee, but the point of this exercise is to learn how to distinguish flavo
rs, not how to brew coffee.
If you want to write down your thoughts, use the following chart as a template. You’ll want to taste each coffee four times, concentrating on only one of the four categories each time. Together, body, sweetness, and acidity determine whether or not a coffee is balanced (coffee is always bitter, so you don’t need to taste for that. However, if it’s overly bitter—i.e., you taste only bitterness and nothing else—then your coffee is probably overextracted.) Each can influence the flavors present in the cup. You may find it helpful to sip the first coffee and then the second before moving on to the next category. You might not think you notice any sweetness in one of the coffees, but after comparing it to the other cup, you might be able to tell that one is at least sweeter than the other. Gut reactions are usually the best reactions, and remember, if you can’t detect anything in a certain category, don’t search too hard. Just move on to the next one.
Here’s how each round breaks down:
1.Body. For the first taste, try to focus only on how the coffee feels in your mouth. Hold the coffee in your mouth and move your tongue around. Does its consistency feel more like water or more like whole milk? Does it feel heavy on your tongue? Gritty? Buttery? Creamy? Does it seem to leave a coating on your tongue or cheeks, or does your mouth feel clean? Does any part of your mouth feel dry or puckered?
2.Sweetness. Before tasting for sweetness, breathe in your coffee’s seductive vapors. Let them envelop you. Think about sweetness and all of its variations: fruit, syrup, caramel, cooked carrots, wine, chocolate, nuts. Now taste the coffee. Move your tongue around. Does anything in there remind you of something sweet? Sweetness is most often associated with a flavor—not an actual sweet taste. Sweetness in coffee tends to be incredibly subtle, and it’s not caused by sugar. Coffee’s natural bitterness, understandably, makes sweetness even harder to discern. Sweetness might sneak in as a tangential feeling. If your immediate reaction is to describe a coffee as “smooth,” for example, it likely contains a fair amount of sweetness. If you taste two coffees side by side and the first one seems sharp or biting and the second one doesn’t, the second one probably contains more sweetness.
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