How Does the SCAA Coffee Flavor Wheel Work in Practice?

The flavor words printed on coffee bags come from cupping vocabulary, and the coffee flavor wheel was built to standardize them. The Specialty Coffee Association of America released the first edition in 1995 as a shared reference for measurement, so tasters describing citrus, berry or chocolate could mean roughly the same thing.

The 2016 revision reorganized the categories and updated how positive and negative flavors are grouped. The wheel separates taste from smell, since aroma carries most of what people call flavor. A simplified consumer version from the Belgian company Cuperus offers a shorter route for beginners building sensory awareness without memorizing the full cupping sheet.

Have you ever wondered where those citrus, berry, chocolate and other flavor descriptions on coffee packaging come from? This article provides a detailed interpretation of the SCA Coffee Flavor Wheel, starting from the first edition released by the SCAA in 1995, sorting out its background, the classification logic of positive and negative flavors, and the major updates in the 2016 new edition. The article not only explains the different roles of taste and smell in coffee tasting, but also introduces the simplified consumer flavor wheel launched by the Belgian company Cuperus. Front Street Coffee takes you through a systematic understanding of the design intent and practical application of the coffee flavor wheel, helping beginners build sensory awareness more quickly and understand the flavor communication language in cupping.

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Flavor In everyday contexts, this term mostly refers to taste or savor. But in the SCA and COE cupping score sheets, it is written as Flavor.

When conducting coffee tasting, people are used to using the word "profile" to describe it. To give a common example, in Sichuan cuisine we call certain tastes profiles: fish-fragrant, sweet-and-sour. Similarly, when it comes to coffee, we also use floral profile, fruit profile, nutty profile to depict the flavor characteristics of a certain bean.

Friends who often buy coffee beans should have experienced this: the flavor descriptions printed on the packaging labels are often especially rich. For example, citrus, berries, chocolate and the like. Some people can't help but wonder: are these flavor descriptions actually based on anything? Front Street Coffee today will introduce everyone to the coffee flavor wheel.

The matter of food sensory perception is essentially personal subjective consciousness. In the field of coffee cupping, even if what you express is a subjective taste opinion, it is still quite difficult to clearly convey it to others.

The Specialty Coffee Association of America invested a great deal of effort in this area. In 1995, the SCAA launched the first edition of the coffee flavor wheel, whose role was to serve as a standardized reference for measurement, ending the situation where everyone said different things. This edition of the flavor wheel basically covered the flavor expressions that coffee beans might present, and roughly listed the directions of the reasons for these flavors appearing.

Regarding the tastes displayed by different coffee tree species and different roasting stages, as well as various defects and flavors caused by improper roasting, etc., it all did a very good job of summarizing and organizing.

The special aromas and tastes marked in bright colors on the SCAA coffee flavor wheel mostly come from aroma components with smaller molecular weights and higher volatility, and they can all be found in SCAA-defined specialty coffee roasted beans and brewed liquid. The flavors of coffee are richer than imaginable, scientists have separated more than 850 kinds of compounds from a cup of black coffee, and different combinations of these compounds form different flavors. At present, the most common coffee flavor types number 85, and these are exactly the specific flavors described on the new SCAA flavor wheel, while in daily life the types of coffee flavor descriptions are even more numerous.

How can one distinguish coffee flavors like a barista? In fact, the reason baristas can taste so many coffee flavors is not that they possess taste sensitivity different from ordinary people, but that they pay more attention to the taste of coffee than most people. Most people, when drinking a delicious beverage or eating good food, usually only exclaim: so tasty!! But baristas will further think about what exactly this taste is and what substances compose it. First-generation flavor wheel The first edition of the coffee flavor wheel was initially released in 1995, and its inventor was Ted Lingle, the first chairman of the SCAA. This is the most iconic flavor sensory reference chart in the coffee industry.

This edition of the flavor wheel is divided into two: negative flavors and positive flavors.

The flavor wheel of negative flavors classifies the undesirable flavors that coffee may produce: The above chart explains the undesirable flavors that may be caused by improper handling at a certain stage in the process of coffee from fruit to processing to roasting, providing a reference for tracing the cause from the source.

The flavor wheel of positive flavors is mainly divided into taste and aroma two major categories, as shown in the following figure:

Taste (left semicircle) is divided into sourness, sweetness, saltiness and bitterness, and these 4 types of taste further extend to the comfort level and intensity of human taste perception; aroma (right semicircle) is considerably more refined than taste, mainly divided into fermentation substances (floral, fruity), sugar browning substances (sugary, chocolate) and charring substances (charcoal, spice).

Human olfactory perception is far more sensitive than taste, and the complexity of aroma also exceeds that of taste, just like what we usually call lemon flavor actually refers to the lemon fruit aroma smelled by the nose, while what is tasted is the acidity of lemon; the aroma of lemon that can be felt in the mouth lies in retronasal olfaction. Updates to the coffee flavor wheel The "coffee flavor wheel" formulated by the SCAA was first updated in early 2016, and this is the revised version after 21 years. Under the coordinated guidance of the SCAA and with the full cooperation of the World Coffee Research Institute (WCR), experts updated and adjusted the "flavor wheel" for the first time.

The SCAA also gathered sensory scientists and coffee industry experts with the University of California, Davis, to connect these terms together and form the new edition of the flavor wheel.

The new edition of the flavor wheel merged positive and negative flavors onto one wheel. It can be seen that the negative flavors in the old edition of the flavor wheel have been "condensed" into other categories. Some herbal plant categories and some roasting categories maximized the perfection of the classification of fruit profiles.

From the changes in the flavor wheel, one can see the rise of the third wave coffee movement and light-roasted coffee.

The new edition of the flavor wheel is divided into herbal/green plants, acidity/fermentation, fruity, floral, sugary, nutty/cocoa, spice, roasted and other categories nine major flavor notes. On this basis, it is further subdivided into more categories with substantive references, such as lemon and orange under fruity, maple syrup and caramel under sugary. Flavor wheel for consumers Although the SCAA coffee flavor wheel is scientific and comprehensive, to ordinary consumers it is like a book without words. The Belgian roasting company Cuperus released a consumer coffee flavor wheel, greatly simplifying the coffee flavor wheel as we commonly know it. In it there are only 6 in total: bright fruity, nutty, sweet fruity, floral, chocolate, and spice-vanilla.

The attentive among you may notice, aren't these 6 categories exactly the most common types of coffee flavor in our daily lives?? And they echo the major positive flavor categories in the 2016 new edition of the coffee flavor wheel. In fact, adopting this simple flavor wheel makes it easier for consumers to understand; letting more people understand the flavors of coffee is precisely where the role of today's coffee flavor wheel lies! And the localization and simplification of the flavor wheel is the beginning of popularization! Summary The substantive references on the coffee flavor wheel are almost all things commonly seen in daily life, and this design is meant to help coffee beginners establish sensory cognition of coffee faster and more accurately. At the same time, it also provides an important reference basis for the coffee cupping stage, and is an important communication link between coffee practitioners and consumers.

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