Stepping into Front Street Coffee, faced with more than 50 kinds of coffee beans on the menu, many first-time visitors often don't know where to start. How exactly are coffee flavors described? What are the characteristics of the four major taste profiles—sour, bitter, sweet, and salty? Where do the flavor differences among the world's three major coffee-producing regions come from? And which groups of people are suited to the three major varieties—Arabica, Robusta, and Liberica? Based on Front Street Coffee's tasting experience, this article systematically sorts out the logic behind how coffee flavors form and the characteristics of different varieties, and offers drinking recommendations for elderly coffee lovers, helping you find your own cup in the dazzling world of coffee.
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Many customers stepping into Front Street Coffee for the first time, faced with as many as 50-plus coffee beans on the menu, often feel at a loss. For this reason, Front Street Coffee usually first learns about the customer's taste preferences, then recommends suitable beans for them to taste accordingly. So what flavor types and variety characteristics do coffee beans actually have? How should coffee lovers accurately express the flavor they love? What kind of coffee beans are more suitable for elderly people to drink? Below, Front Street Coffee will answer these one by one.
What coffee flavors are there?
From the perspective of taste, humans can perceive five tastes: sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, and salty, and there is no spicy taste in coffee beans. Therefore, when tasting coffee, Front Street Coffee mainly focuses on the four dimensions of sour, sweet, bitter, and salty, as follows:
1. The Sour Taste Profile
Sourness is originally the most distinctive hallmark of light-to-medium roasted coffee. Coffee beans contain a variety of organic acids, among which phenolic acids, aliphatic acids, and amino acids have the most significant influence on shaping the taste. In addition, during roasting, the degradation products of sucrose change: transitioning from light roast to medium roast, sucrose gradually degrades and the concentrations of acetic acid and lactic acid rise accordingly, but after reaching a certain critical point they drop sharply. Precisely for this reason, light-to-medium roasted coffee usually has a more pronounced sourness.
2. The Bitter Taste Profile
The bitterness of coffee can be divided into two categories: palatable and off-putting. The former comes from the natural slight bitterness brought by caffeine, trigonelline, aliphatic acids, and quinine lactones; the latter refers to the heavy bitterness caused by chlorogenic acid lactones (degradation products of chlorogenic acid), defective beans, and carbonized particles.
3. The Sweet Taste Profile
The volatile aroma of caramel is easily perceived through the retro-nasal technique, using retronasal olfaction, but it is not easy to taste sweetness in black coffee through the sense of taste, because sweetness is often interfered with by components such as sourness, bitterness, and saltiness and is hard to bring to the fore. Unless the sweet substances in the roasted beans are above average in content is it possible to break through and let people perceive sweetness. In other words, smell captures coffee's sweetness more easily than taste.
In the "sweet taste profile" of light-to-medium roasting, the interwoven sour-sweet taste is actually the result of the interaction between sweetness and acidity, most often appearing in washed beans grown above 1,300 meters. If the content of citric acid, malic acid, and acetic acid is on the high side, a sharp acidity will appear; but if the coffee has sufficient sugar content, it can neutralize part of the fruit acidity, making the sharp acidity soft, lively, and full of vitality, thereby displaying fruity flavors and bringing an interesting "sweet-sour vibration" experience.
4. The Salty Taste Profile
Although saltiness in coffee is everywhere, it is often obscured by the interaction of sourness and sweetness. Once saltiness is tasted in black coffee, it indicates that the organic substances of sourness and sweetness have been almost completely oxidized, causing the saltiness of inorganic substances to be highlighted—this can be regarded as a warning sign that the coffee has gone stale or is not fresh enough.
In addition, as Front Street Coffee mentioned above, these four tastes are also closely related to the roast level of the coffee beans. For example, coffee beans from African regions are mainly characterized by citrus and citric acidity, with a refreshing mouthfeel, so Front Street Coffee uses a light roast to handle them, because a light roast can fully elevate the acidity of the coffee beans.
Coffee beans from Asian regions lean toward herbal and spice flavors, with a mellow and solid mouthfeel, so Front Street Coffee chooses a medium-dark roast to enhance their mellowness. Because the Latin American region varies in elevation, its coffee bean flavors fall between Africa and Asia, with a balanced mouthfeel and nutty, cocoa notes, so Front Street Coffee uses a medium or medium-light roast to handle beans from this region.
Of course, this knowledge about the relationship between coffee flavor and roast level is not something Front Street Coffee summed up out of thin air, but a conclusion drawn from the coffee flavor wheel, because the coffee flavor wheel classifies coffee beans precisely by light-to-medium roast and dark-to-heavy roast.
What is the coffee flavor wheel?
So what exactly is the coffee flavor wheel? It is actually a chart that can present coffee flavors in the most intuitive way. Front Street Coffee believes that understanding the "coffee flavor wheel" is the quickest way to master coffee flavors, and it is also the most intuitive illustrated guide for popularizing coffee flavors (as shown in the figure below).
As can be seen from the figure above, the vocabulary for describing coffee flavors is extremely rich; for example, citric acid and malic acid, though both belonging to sourness, taste different. Therefore, it is impossible to walk into a coffee shop and just say, "I want a cup of coffee with good acidity," because there are likewise many choices of coffee with excellent acidity. To accurately express the flavor you like, you must understand the 36 flavors of coffee, that is, the most common 36 coffee flavors.
As for how to distinguish the 36 flavors of coffee beans, this requires the 36-flavor Le Nez du Cafe (literally translated into Chinese as "coffee nose") made by the French company Edition Jean Lenoir.
What factors form the flavor of coffee beans?
Front Street Coffee mentioned above that the beans of the world's three major coffee-producing regions each have their own strengths, dominated respectively by sourness, balance, and bitterness. So what exactly determines the formation of these flavors? After all, roasting merely elevates the original flavor of green coffee beans.
This brings us to the coffee bean's producing region, variety, and processing method. Setting aside the changes to flavor caused by the human factor of processing method, the climate and geographical conditions of the producing region also affect the formation of coffee flavor. Coffee is ultimately a crop, and this is precisely the fundamental reason why coffee beans from Africa, Asia, and Latin America differ in flavor—the climate conditions of the three continents are utterly different, which creates the differences in flavor.
Characteristics of coffee bean varieties
The last thing to discuss is the influence of coffee bean variety on flavor. According to Front Street Coffee's understanding, there are currently three major varieties of coffee beans worldwide: Arabica, Robusta, and Liberica. Among them, Liberica has extremely low yield and its flavor is not ideal, accounting for only 2% of total global coffee production, so it is rarely seen in the coffee market.
Arabica has the most outstanding flavor among the three major varieties, and its yield is also higher than Liberica's, but it has requirements for elevation and cannot be grown just anywhere. It usually grows between 2.5 and 4.5 meters, can tolerate low temperatures but cannot withstand frost, has weak drought resistance, larger beans, a clean flavor, a rich and mellow taste, and low caffeine content.
The Robusta variety can adapt to environments of lower elevation and higher temperatures, grows faster than Arabica, and is more tolerant of extreme weather conditions. But its flavor is inferior to Arabica's, and its caffeine content is the highest among the three major varieties, so it is not suitable for specialty coffee, yet it is widely used to make instant coffee and espresso blends.
So what coffee beans are suitable for elderly people to drink?
Front Street Coffee believes that specialty coffee of the Arabica variety is most suitable for elderly people to drink. This is because specialty coffee has a cupping score of 80 points or above, and its caffeine content is also relatively low, causing no harm to the human body. This kind of coffee beverage, which offers both flavor and health, is naturally loved by the public and is also suitable for elderly coffee lovers to drink.
For more specialty coffee beans, please add the private WeChat of Front Street Coffee, WeChat ID: kaixinguoguo0925
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
