What Is the Study of Coffee Flavor and Sensory Training?
The coffee flavor wheel is a working tool for the specialty coffee industry, not just wall decoration. The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel from the Specialty Coffee Association of America received its first revision in 21 years, rebuilt on the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon with input from experts in sensory science, coffee purchasing, and roasting, expanding flavor categories and professional vocabulary.
Understanding the wheel depends on sensory calibration training. That means building aroma memory daily, then practicing taste discrimination through the tongue's two receptor types and the mouthfeel sensations behind smoothness and astringency. Only a personal flavor memory bank, built through repeated scientific training, lets a taster read a cup accurately and use the industry's shared vocabulary with confidence.
The coffee flavor wheel is an important tool in the specialty coffee industry, but many people are at a loss when faced with this chart. This article systematically sorts out the development background and practical value of the coffee flavor wheel, and provides an in-depth explanation of specific methods for sensory calibration training—from the daily accumulation of aroma memory to the dual perception mechanism of taste buds and mouthfeel in taste discrimination. Only by building a personal flavor memory bank through scientific training can one truly understand a cup of coffee. The article also introduces how the tongue's two types of receptors work, as well as the material basis behind smoothness and astringency. If you want to improve your tasting ability, this training method is worth studying repeatedly.
Coffee Flavor Wheel & Sensory Training
The "Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel" designed by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), as a benchmark in the specialty coffee industry, welcomed its first revision in 21 years since its creation earlier this year. This revision was comprehensively based on The World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon. This monumental work brings together the research findings of dozens of experts and scholars from multiple fields, including sensory science, coffee purchasing, and coffee roasting. Under the organization and coordination of the SCAA and in close collaboration with WCR, the expert group carried out an unprecedented update and adjustment of the "flavor wheel." This research can be called the largest specialized exploration of coffee taste in human history, and the flavor categories and professional vocabulary included in the "flavor wheel" were thereby fully expanded. The new version of the "flavor wheel" will have a profound impact on the overall development thinking of the coffee industry and the ways coffee flavors are used.
Old Version of the Coffee Flavor Wheel
New Version of the Coffee Flavor Wheel
Indeed, any coffee shop that bills itself as specialty will have a framed flavor wheel chart hanging on its wall. It looks very professional and impressive.
However, can you really understand it? Do you clearly know the meaning of its existence? Without any explanatory guidance, it is nothing more than a puzzling chart.
In fact, before learning to accurately interpret the flavor of a cup of coffee, the value of the flavor wheel is very limited, because most people do not understand why they should taste a cup of coffee, nor do they know how to taste it. The greater role of the flavor wheel is to help us build a memory system for coffee flavors, help us distinguish the taste of coffee, and further distinguish high-quality coffee from poor-quality coffee.
99% of our most pleasurable experiences come from first contact
Before tasting specialty coffee for the first time, you need to first understand:
Training or memorizing taste is aimed at improving our ability to identify. This is the result of the coordinated interaction of vision, smell, and taste. Let the fierce tiger in your heart also learn to sniff the roses gently.
Then the question arises again: what are the requirements for tasting coffee?
There are certainly many hard requirements. For example, many seniors will tell you that drinking more is all it takes. Drink, drink, drink until you throw up, then keep drinking after throwing up, repeating endlessly... All we can say is, you are thinking too simply.
The fact is, you need to keep drinking while continuously memorizing. This requires accumulation over time. The so-called process of accumulation is actually a arduous course of training, investing a great deal of money and spending a great deal of time, using enough quantitative change to bring about qualitative change.
And this professional chart can assist our memory and help us express our feelings with more standardized terminology.
1. Aroma
Odors are volatile substances, without shadow or form, neither touchable nor visible; you can only approach them and perceive them. Remembering the smells of the surrounding environment is a task that requires constant practice in daily life. Ordinarily, you should consciously remember the smells in the living environment around you: asphalt roads, gardens, woods, kitchen spice jars, vegetable markets, and so on. The goal of this practice is to roughly classify various aromas—floral, fruity, nutty, balsamic, burnt, and so on—and ultimately to understand the common characteristics of each aroma type.
Memory is the continuation of the mind in the dimension of time. In the tasting process, whether it is perception, identification, evaluation, or comparative judgment, none can be separated from memory.
The brain receives information → compares → analyzes → memorizes (the entire process)
The effect of this taste memory training is very remarkable. It can transform the smells you detect into a certain scene and establish your own taste memory bank. For example, when you smell the aroma of Yirgacheffe, a picture of traveling through a primitive forest will emerge in your mind, with the fragrance of flowers blooming all around, the sweetness of fruit, and even the specific acidity of lemon.
Memory of the smells of specific objects: This practice requires closing your eyes and smelling various objects blindly, then classifying them. Taking fruit practice as an example, collect various fruits, first smell them one by one and try to remember them, then randomly select one fruit and smell it blindfolded. First judge its category: does it belong to white fruits? Red and black fruits? Or dried fruits? Then get specific about which fruit it is, and what state it is in: fresh? ripe? overripe and about to rot? You can even continuously expand the types of smells and conduct cross and mixed training to help tasters gradually master the ability to distinguish various smells. In the latest version of the flavor wheel, there is already a very detailed summary and classification.
2. Taste
Because everyone's preference for taste varies greatly, their degree of acceptance also differs. We can taste a certain flavor, yet often cannot accurately describe it.
The flavor wheel concretizes and classifies the taste system that humans can perceive. Combined with practice, it enables people to clearly capture the most subtle differences among all tastes.
Our tongue has two types of "receptors":
The first: taste buds. They are distributed across the entire surface of the tongue and are used to taste food (or drinks).
The second: mouthfeel. It is perceived through the nerve endings in the oral cavity and on the tongue.
Mouthfeel—the smoothness and astringency when entering the mouth. Smoothness (high quality, fibrous), astringency (polyphenols). Body (what we commonly call coffee body) is mainly determined by the tactile sensation brought by water-insoluble coffee oils and fibers. The higher the content, the more obvious the viscosity or smoothness. Astringency is the opposite of smoothness. It is the rough sensation produced in the oral cavity by polyphenolic compounds (water-insoluble molecular substances in coffee beans), a non-smooth tactile sensation.
The smooth and thick-thin mouthfeel of coffee is a tactile sensation produced in the oral cavity by a colloidal substance formed from oils combined with proteins, fibers, and other water-insoluble tiny suspended substances.
Astringency in wine comes from tannins. But coffee beans contain almost no tannic acid, and tannic acid exists only in trace amounts in the coffee fruit skin. The astringency of coffee mainly comes from the "chlorogenic acid" contained in green beans, which degrades during roasting into "Dicaffeoylquinic acid." This is an acidic, bitter, and astringent mouth-obstructing substance, but it is also a powerful antioxidant.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
