Specialty coffee has developed over many years into a scientific system, with a comprehensive body of knowledge covering everything from green bean cultivation and processing to roasting, brewing, and tasting.
The improvement of green bean quality, roasting, and brewing ultimately serves to give us a better experience when tasting coffee. So learning to taste is actually an important part of studying coffee. There are also professional courses in coffee tasting, such as the Q-Grader certification for industry professionals and the SCA sensory skills courses for coffee enthusiasts.These courses can help those with some foundational coffee knowledge organize what they know and calibrate their sensory perception of coffee flavors. For complete beginners, however, the high tuition fees are far out of proportion to what they actually absorb. Therefore, Front Street Coffee doesn't particularly recommend that newbies rush headlong into signing up for coffee courses. It's better to observe first, learn some basic coffee knowledge that's readily available, and then decide.
Of course, the booming development of specialty coffee has attracted many people who want to learn about coffee, including some who are eager to learn how to taste coffee flavors—they want to be like coffee professionals, able to rattle off dozens of flavor descriptors the moment they taste a coffee. As for where beginners should start learning to taste coffee, Front Street Coffee has a few suggestions. Those who are interested can try following along.
If you ask a barista, "Why are you so sensitive to coffee flavors?" the answer you'll probably get is, "Drink often—drink more and you'll be able to taste the flavors in coffee."
There's actually a lot of truth to this. All coffee flavors, or taste memories, are accumulated through continuous tasting and memorization. Unless you have a "golden palate" or an extraordinary memory that lets you never forget a taste after trying it once, you'll still need to drink coffee regularly and remember the characteristics of each coffee.
Even if you take a professional coffee tasting course, you'll still need to keep tasting coffee afterward to build up your flavor library. Otherwise, all you'll get in return for your expensive tuition is a certificate.
- Set aside flavors first, and judge the taste
If you force yourself to come up with flavor descriptors no matter what right from the start, that's putting the cart before the horse and being too hasty. Coffee tasting is a long-term accumulation process—there's no crash course. If you're a complete beginner learning to taste and describe coffee flavors from scratch, Front Street Coffee suggests you first forget about flavor descriptions altogether. Start with the most basic thing: drinking coffee and saying how you feel.
Coffee sensory perception is a fairly subjective judgment—it depends on personal taste preferences and on how sensitive you are to various tastes. Coffee tasting, however, is subjective with an objective element: judging whether a coffee is good or bad shouldn't be based on personal preference but on objective description. Whatever taste you detect, that's what you describe.
Identifying the taste of a cup of coffee is the simplest part, because there are only five basic tastes—sour, sweet, bitter, salty, and umami—and coffee most often has only three: sour, sweet, and bitter. Let Front Street Coffee give an example. When we taste a washed Yirgacheffe coffee bean, the very first sip reveals a very obvious sourness. At that point, we need to judge whether that sourness is a sharp, pungent acidity, a sweet-and-sour fruity acidity, a soft and mild acidity, or a fermented vinegar-like acidity.
When tasting a Brazilian coffee bean, you can clearly detect that the coffee is full of bitterness. But we need to judge whether that bitterness is a pleasant bitterness, a strong and pungent bitterness, an extremely unpleasant burnt bitterness, or a bitterness that gives way to sweetness—or whether you can detect a hint of sweetness emerging from the bitterness, with a slight chocolate note.
Use this kind of comparative approach to try different types of coffee and rank them. For example, if coffees A, B, and C are all sour coffees, but ranked by acidity they go A > B > C, then judging by acidity quality: A's acidity is a bit pungent, sharp, and unpleasant. B is also quite sour, but it drinks very pleasantly and enjoyably. C has a wonderful sweet-and-sour quality—tangy and sweet, like drinking a blended fruit juice.Use this approach first to memorize coffee tastes, and develop the habit of subconsciously tasting coffee flavors whenever you drink coffee.
- Understand flavors
The coffee flavors we describe are composed of taste and aroma. And coffee's aroma is the source of many flavors. The reason we use other things to describe coffee flavors is twofold: on one hand, we can taste flavors in coffee similar to those of other things (fruits); on the other hand, it gives people who haven't tried that coffee a mental picture of what it tastes like. So the flavor descriptors we use are all common foods from everyday life that we eat regularly.
Let Front Street Coffee give an example to help everyone understand. If a barista introduces a coffee bean to you as having strawberry flavors, breaking that down means: in terms of taste, the coffee bean's sweetness and acidity are similar to the sweet-tart quality of berries like strawberries; and in terms of aroma, you can detect the aromatic characteristics of strawberries in the coffee.
For example, in coffee flavor descriptions, rose, jasmine, vanilla, mango, roasted sweet potato, and honey (water) are all expressed through aroma. So, besides drinking and tasting more coffee, you also need to carefully appreciate the aromatic characteristics of foods around you in daily life. Only by storing these flavor memories in your brain's flavor library can you immediately recognize what flavor it is the next time you smell something similar in coffee.
The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.
