How Does the Brain Taste Coffee and Store Aromas

Tasting coffee is mostly smelling. The tongue handles only five basic tastes, while thousands of aromas in coffee are captured by olfactory cells in the nasal cavity. Those signals travel to the brain, which identifies them. If the brain holds no stored memory of an odor, the flavor cannot be named, which is why a blocked nose flattens the cup.

Building that library is straightforward: drink with full attention, and drink often. Labeling flavors and setting olfactory memory points, using citrus as a starting example from daily life, makes recognition faster over time. Coffee bean descriptions in tasting notes reflect this same shared vocabulary rather than fixed objective facts.

Many people think coffee flavors are tasted with the tongue, but in reality, taste can only distinguish five basic tastes, while the thousands of aromas in coffee are mainly perceived through the sense of smell. Front Street Coffee is often asked by customers how to scientifically learn coffee tasting and whether there is a quick way to identify flavors. The answer is simple—drink with attention, and drink often—but behind it lies a trainable logic of sensory memory. This article will share how to improve flavor recognition by labeling flavors and building olfactory memory points, and use citrus fruits as an example to explain how to start from daily life and gradually identify the aroma characteristics of pour-over coffee.

Customers who come to the shop often ask Front Street how to scientifically practice coffee tasting and whether there is any way to distinguish the various flavors in coffee relatively quickly. Due to time constraints, Front Street can usually only give one core piece of advice—drink with attention, and after drinking enough, you will naturally develop a feel for it.

Today Front Street will try to sort out some specific ideas on "how to taste coffee flavors" (once you know the method, it still depends on practice to see results).

-How do we perceive flavors?-

Many people subconsciously think that flavor is tasted, and that taste should play the leading role. But the actual situation is that taste can only distinguish five basic tastes: sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and umami, while the thousands of aromas in coffee rely on "smelling." People with rhinitis or who are currently suffering from a cold should especially understand this: once the nose is blocked, almost everything tastes bland.

The olfactory cells in the nasal cavity are responsible for capturing odors, and the taste buds on the tongue are responsible for sensing tastes. But they themselves do not judge "what odor this is" or "what taste this is"; instead, they transmit the collected signals to the brain, and the brain identifies them. If the brain has never stored a memory of this odor or taste, then naturally it cannot identify it. So when Front Street says to drink more, the essence is to let the brain continuously accumulate memories.

-Building flavor memory points-

Think back to the scene in Chinese class when memorizing a text: you could memorize a text in just one day, but after a week, only fragmented impressions remained. The reason is that you did not grasp the memory points of that text and just memorized it by rote. Once the task at hand was completed, the brain naturally "put it in the recycle bin."

Identifying flavors is the same. You need to "label" each flavor to form memory points. Many light-roast coffee beans list "citrus" in their flavor descriptions. If we cannot perceive it when drinking, that is okay. We can start with the fruit "citrus" itself and retrieve the memory of this fruit.

Although fruits in the "citrus" category are all sweet and sour, the range is actually quite wide. Just to list a few—kumquat, sugar mandarin, ugly mandarin, tribute mandarin, navel orange, Sunkist orange—each has its own characteristics. If you pinch your nose while eating these citrus fruits, you can only distinguish which are sweeter and which are more sour.

Once you release your nose, the aroma rushes in. The deepest impression citrus gives Front Street is the fresh fragrance filling the air the moment the peel is opened, the sweet and sour juice bursting out when chewing, and the rich fruity aroma felt through retronasal olfaction. At this point, we can label this type of citrus as "fresh fruity aroma." If we want to go further, we can also make more detailed distinctions within the citrus category, for example, Sunkist is "sharp, fresh, with a strong juicy feel," while tribute mandarin is "light, with a subtle fragrance."

Here is another everyday example: the cucumber flavor of a certain brand of potato chips—did everyone really taste cucumber? It is worth thinking carefully about what label you have actually attached to cucumber.

There is no quick shortcut to learning to identify coffee flavors. This article has only briefly discussed how to "remember flavors." The next article will discuss "how to classify flavors like a library and apply that to coffee flavors," and the one after that will teach a lot...

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.