What does the coffee association say about salty coffee?

Salty coffee is not a flaw in your sense of taste. Coffee holds four basic tastes: sour, sweet, bitter, and salty, and they balance each other. When sweetness is too low, saltiness surfaces on its own. Espresso shows it most often because its concentration amplifies every taste at once, so a short shot can read clearly salty.

The causes are spread across the whole chain: processing method, arabica beans and their growing altitude, defective beans, brewing water, roast level, freshness, and extraction technique. Sourness and saltiness are easily confused in low-quality acidity, but they still behave differently. Some beans are naturally and unusually salty. Fixing the water first, then the extraction, removes most of it.

When drinking coffee, you may occasionally encounter a salty taste. This is not an illusion, nor is there something wrong with your sense of taste. Coffee itself contains four basic tastes: sour, sweet, bitter, and salty, which balance one another. Once sweetness is insufficient, saltiness readily emerges. The sources of saltiness are quite complex and may involve the processing method, coffee bean variety and altitude, defective beans, brewing water, roast level and freshness, and extraction technique, among other factors. Among these, espresso tends to show saltiness more prominently because of the relationship between taste distribution and concentration. This article will sort out the causes of saltiness one by one and retain the Front Street brand recommendation to help coffee lovers understand and try to avoid brewing a cup of coffee with a salty taste.

Sometimes after taking a sip of coffee, you actually taste a bit of saltiness... Is this a problem with your own sense of taste, or is something wrong with the coffee itself?

In fact, coffee is far more than bitter; it also contains sour, sweet, and salty, and these four tastes suppress and balance one another. Among them, sweetness plays a crucial role in a cup of coffee, because once sweetness is lacking, sourness becomes sharp, bitterness turns harsh, and saltiness also emerges. Since saltiness already exists in coffee, how can we avoid brewing it out?

| Saltiness in Coffee

Saltiness itself also has multiple forms of expression. At the aromatic level, it can remind people of foods with a heavier salty taste, such as the smell when too much salt is added while cooking, as well as the aroma left at the bottom of the cup after drinking coffee, which smells salty and easily brings to mind salty snacks like shrimp crackers and Want Want Senbei. In terms of mouthfeel, the summary is simply the taste of salt.

When making pour-over and espresso in daily practice, we occasionally taste and "smell" saltiness (the smell here refers to the aroma after grinding). In the vast majority of cases, saltiness is more prominent in Espresso.

Due to the distribution characteristics of taste, sourness and saltiness are easily confused, and poor-quality acidity and saltiness are hard to distinguish. But after all, it is still different from the saltiness of salt. Of course, some beans are naturally and unusually obviously salty, very close to the saltiness of sea salt.

| Processing Method

Some special processing methods bring this salty taste to coffee beans. For example, India's monsoon processing method exposes green beans to moist sea breezes, making the beans larger and yellowish and sometimes giving them a sea-salt taste; of course, there are also cases where they become salty because they pick up an oceanic flavor during maritime transport.

| Coffee Beans

The higher the altitude, the greater the temperature difference between day and night, the more slowly the coffee fruit grows, and the more sugar the coffee cherry naturally accumulates; the lower the altitude, the more susceptible it is to disease, so beans grown at low altitudes have higher chlorogenic acid content and lower organic acid and sugar content, making the flavor relatively poor and prone to saltiness.

In addition, varieties crossed with Robusta are also prone to saltiness. This is because the sucrose content in Arabica green beans is about twice that of Robusta beans, so in terms of flavor, Robusta beans are somewhat inferior to Arabica beans, and beans with Robusta genes are also more likely to show saltiness.

| Defective Beans

Unripe Beans

If unripe beans are mixed into coffee, it may taste salty. This is because the organic acids contained in unripe coffee beans have not been converted into sugar, making them prone to grassy, sharply sour, and astringent notes.

Unripe beans are also called white-eye beans. They are not easy to spot in the green bean state, but after roasting they become very obvious. Because the coffee cherry itself may not be fully ripe, or may have absorbed insufficient nutrients compared with normal fruit (insufficient sugar accumulation), there are insufficient convertible substances during roasting. Therefore, white-eye beans undergo caramelization and the Maillard reaction to a lesser extent than normal beans, making them hard to color, and in the roasted state white-eye beans are somewhat lighter in color than other beans.

Fermented Beans (Sour Beans)

Over-fermented washed beans contain relatively high levels of acetic acid and lactic acid. When acidity is too high, it suppresses sweetness, and saltiness then emerges; over-fermented natural beans and honey-processed beans have higher salt-bearing minerals, and when combined with the dead acidity brought by over-fermentation, the saltiness becomes even more prominent.

Delayed processing after harvest or improper storage can also produce fermented beans, which give off a strange odor during roasting. If they end up in coffee, they will give it a sour, foul smell and are harmful to the body.

| Water

Do not assume that any water will do for brewing a delicious cup of coffee. About 98%-99% of a cup of coffee is water. The pH value, hardness, and total dissolved solids of water all affect the flavor of coffee. If the brewing water is acidic, or if the calcium and magnesium ion content in the water is too low, the brewed coffee will have sharp acidity, and sharp acidity happens to be an enhancer of saltiness.

So choosing what kind of water to use for brewing coffee is also very important. We usually choose water that is neutral and tasteless, can bring out the aroma of coffee, and is moderately soft or hard.

According to the taste test results of the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA), coffee is rated best when its total dissolved solids (TDS) are around 1.5%.

| Roast Level and Freshness of Coffee Beans

If the quality of the green coffee beans is not good enough, the sugar content is not high, the acidity is not very good either, or if they are roasted quickly over high heat or dropped soon after first crack, the flavor development is incomplete and dehydration is insufficient, resulting in underdeveloped coffee beans. Such coffee has only sharp acidity without sweetness, and may also be salty.

Dark-roasted beans have softer fibers, more gaps in the internal structure of the bean, and a stronger degassing ability. Carbon dioxide more easily carries organic substances out during degassing. At the same time, dark-roasted beans contain less organic acid, and the acidity is not enough to suppress saltiness. Therefore, if the coffee beans are dark-roasted and not very fresh, the brewed coffee is likely to taste salty.

| Brewing

During brewing, if the concentration is high but the extraction yield is low, a distinct salty taste can be tasted. When making pour-over coffee, the first substances to be dissolved are actually acidic substances, then sweetness emerges, while bitter substances appear last.

If it is under-extracted light-roasted coffee, the acidity is very high, the sweetness is insufficient, and saltiness is still present. Sourness, sweetness, and bitterness are clearly imbalanced. High acidity enhances the salty perception, while sweetness not only fails to suppress sourness and saltiness but is instead suppressed.

Tasting coffee is a very interesting thing. After all, there are all kinds of flavors in coffee, both good and bad. We taste various wonderful flavors from it, then keep learning and improving our brewing methods, which is very fascinating. Front Street Coffee also suggests that enthusiasts check item by item from processing method, bean variety, water quality, and extraction parameters to find the source of saltiness and adjust accordingly.

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