How do you describe coffee aroma, taste, and aftertaste?
Describing coffee comes down to five stages: aroma, taste, flavor, mouthfeel, and aftertaste. Aroma splits into dry aroma, captured right after grinding when intensity peaks, and wet aroma, released when grounds meet hot water. Taste covers the basic sensations on the tongue, flavor the specific notes you recognize, mouthfeel the body and texture, and aftertaste what lingers once the cup is empty.
PWN Golden Mandheling works as a practical example of the method. Medium-light roasts tend to show more of the aromatic compounds formed during roasting, so more of the coffee aroma reaches the nose before brewing. Working through the five steps in order, then writing down each impression, makes it easier to judge quality and to put a cup into clear words.
Tasting a cup of coffee is not as mysterious as it seems. As long as you follow a systematic method, you can accurately judge its quality and fluently describe what you taste. From the perspective of Front Street, this article breaks coffee tasting down into five steps—aroma, taste, flavor, mouthfeel, and aftertaste—and explains the key points and descriptive techniques for each stage one by one. It then uses PWN Golden Mandheling as an example to show how to apply this method to the tasting of a specific coffee, helping readers fully grasp the appreciation logic of Mandheling coffee from aroma to aftertaste.
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Coffee tasting may sound intimidating at first, but in practice it is actually quite straightforward. There is a general framework for it, and as long as you follow that framework, you can judge whether a cup of coffee is high quality or not. At the same time, if you turn the impressions you get during tasting into written or spoken expression, you can absolutely describe a cup of coffee in a clear and organized way. Below, Front Street will break down the five steps of coffee tasting, hoping to help everyone become more skilled at coffee tasting and description more quickly.
The first step of tasting: aroma During roasting, coffee beans generate a large number of aromatic compounds through chemical reactions, and these substances are not only released by water. When coffee beans are ground into powder, the bean structure breaks apart, and a large number of aromatic components escape with it. So the starting point of coffee tasting actually arrives the moment you grind. The first thing we need to do is use orthonasal olfaction, inhaling to capture and experience the aroma drifting in the air. Simply put: smell the aroma.
Aroma can be divided into two parts: dry aroma and wet aroma. Dry aroma refers to the aroma given off by coffee beans after grinding, while still dry and not yet brewed; at this stage, aroma intensity reaches its peak. Wet aroma is the aroma released after coffee grounds come into contact with hot water. Compared with dry aroma, wet aroma is usually much weaker, but precisely because the intensity is lower, it gives you a chance to catch different aroma characteristics.
Generally speaking, medium-light roasted beans tend toward fresh notes such as floral and fruity aromas; medium-dark roasted beans more often present steadier types such as roasted notes, chocolate, and spices. Then, according to each aroma's expression, we can pair it with corresponding adjectives to form a complete description. Taking floral aroma as an example, there are quite a lot of usable adjectives, such as rich, delicate, and so on; just choose according to the overall tone of the aroma.
The second step of tasting: taste After smelling the aroma, we enter the most critical part: drinking. We need to experience the coffee entering the mouth from three different dimensions. Since these sensations happen simultaneously, Front Street will explain them here one by one in order. The first thing to discuss is the taste of the coffee. In coffee, there are four tastes we can perceive: sour, sweet, bitter, and salty.
But we must not only identify which tastes are present in the coffee, but also judge their intensity and quality. Front Street takes acidity as an example (because acidity is the main taste in coffee). The acidity in coffee can be good or bad, and the industry habitually calls it acidity quality. High-quality acidity makes coffee pleasant to drink, and the corresponding descriptors include: soft, bright, lively, and so on; conversely, it makes the coffee hard to drink, with related descriptors such as: sharp, dull, harsh, and so on.
The third step of tasting: flavor Flavor perception is the most favored part of specialty coffee. It requires combining the aroma and taste of the coffee in your mouth and then associating it with the taste of some food commonly encountered in daily life. This is the greatest pleasure of coffee tasting, and also the most challenging point. The core reason many friends cannot describe coffee is that it is hard to associate specific flavors, and they remain only at the second step of taste perception. In this situation, Front Street suggests first reading this article, "Is Coffee Flavor Mysticism?", to understand the principles of flavor perception.
Once we have successfully mastered flavor perception, we can combine it with taste to make simple combined sentences. For example: if you perceive a citrus flavor in the coffee, and the coffee's acidity gives you a bright impression, then the description can be written as: bright citrus acidity.
The fourth step of tasting: mouthfeel Mouthfeel refers to the tactile sensation coffee brings us. The word "body," which we often hear, is mainly used in the coffee field to describe coffee's body, or fullness. Coffee's body refers to the sense of "weight" the tongue feels after the coffee enters the mouth.
A common example Front Street often gives: skim milk, whole milk, and cream—these three dairy products bring completely different mouthfeels. Skim milk feels thin like water, whole milk is somewhat heavier, fuller, and smoother overall, while cream is very heavy, with a substantial feeling. The same principle applies to coffee. The higher the coffee's body, the heavier the weight felt by the tongue; the lower the body, the opposite. (For detailed content on body, please go to this article → "Coffee Body")
The final step of tasting: aftertaste After we have experienced the coffee through the above three dimensions, we can swallow. And after swallowing, there is still one item for us to experience, namely the coffee's aftertaste. In other words, coffee tasting is not truly finished until the aftertaste has been experienced. Aftertaste, in plain terms, is the aroma that remains in the mouth after swallowing coffee, or the mouth still clearly sensing coffee aroma continuously emerging.
The aftertaste of coffee mainly comes from retronasal olfaction "catching" the coffee's aroma. The principle is not complicated: coffee contains a large number of oil-soluble aromatic substances, and after drinking coffee, some of the oils remain in the mouth and are not swallowed. As the oils gradually break down, the aromatic substances hidden within them volatilize, and are then captured by our retronasal olfaction, allowing us to sense the aroma—this is aftertaste. The evaluation of aftertaste is also divided into two dimensions: first, how long it lasts, and second, the quality of the aroma. An excellent aftertaste will remain for a longer time, because this indicates the coffee has a rich content of substances and has been fully extracted (different brewing methods lead to different standards for judging aftertaste duration); judging the quality of aftertaste from the aroma level is similar to flavor, mainly depending on whether the flavor expression it gives off is positive or negative.
Front Street takes light-roast pour-over coffee as an example. In light-roast pour-over coffee, a high-quality aftertaste lasts roughly more than ten seconds, with flavor expressions such as light floral notes, tea-like character, and honey; while a poor aftertaste lasts only a very short time, or even none at all. Its flavor expression is: dry, bitter, or other unpleasant tastes.
How to taste a cup of Golden Mandheling coffee
Golden Mandheling coffee is PWN's exclusive signature product. Because the "Golden Mandheling" trademark was registered early on, only Mandheling produced by PWN can be called "Golden Mandheling." The characteristic of Golden Mandheling coffee is that the green beans have undergone multiple rounds of screening, and the overall quality is very high. PWN purchases Mandheling green beans of 18 screen size and above, G1 grade with fewer than 3 defective beans in a 300g sample, which is the highest grade of Indonesian green beans. Afterward, defective beans are strictly sorted according to standards through 1 mechanical selection plus 3 manual selections, ensuring the color, shape, and size of the Mandheling coffee beans are uniform. Therefore, Front Street's PWN Golden Mandheling tastes cleaner and more transparent, with more obvious body and sweetness.
After Golden Mandheling coffee is ground into powder, you can smell a full roasted hazelnut aroma, and during the stage of pouring in hot water and blooming, the caramel note is very prominent. On the palate, the coffee presents dark chocolate, nuts, caramel, and sweet fruit flavors, and as the temperature drops, various spice notes begin to fill the mouth. The finish is long-lasting, with high balance, varied layers overall, rich and full-bodied, and a clean mouthfeel.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
