Many coffee enthusiasts feel puzzled when tasting coffee with floral notes—why can others detect jasmine and rose scents, while you can only perceive fruity flavors? In fact, capturing the floral notes in coffee is not a talent; it requires understanding the source of the aromas and mastering the correct tasting methods. The floral notes in coffee come from the combination of various compounds such as terpenes, alcohols, and aldehydes, which also exist in real flowers and trigger our memories and associations with fresh blooms through olfactory stimulation. This article, drawing on Front Street's tasting experience, systematically explains how to enhance perception by breaking down floral characteristics, and provides a detailed introduction to three common types of floral notes in coffee—light floral, subtle floral, and dense floral—along with corresponding Front Street bean list recommendations, to help you more easily detect the floral notes in coffee. [more…]

To accurately evaluate the quality of a cup of coffee, there is actually a tasting logic that can be followed. Front Street breaks down the tasting of single-origin coffee into five steps: aroma, taste, flavor, mouthfeel, and aftertaste, each with specific points of perception and methods of description. Once you have mastered this process, whether for daily drinking or writing tasting notes, you will be able to express your impressions in a more organized way. The second half of the article uses Front Street PWN Golden Mandheling coffee to show how to apply the tasting framework to a specific bean type and experience Mandheling's signature richness, caramel, and spice notes. [more…]

Friends who are just getting into coffee often feel that tasting is some mysterious art, not knowing where to start, and unable to come up with more than a few decent descriptors. In fact, there is a universal method for tasting coffee that anyone can follow: simply perceive it in a fixed order, and you can judge the quality of a cup and turn the experience into precise language. This article uses Front Street Jamaican Blue Mountain No. 1 coffee beans as an example, breaking things down one by one across five dimensions—aroma, taste, flavor, mouthfeel, and aftertaste—to help you build a complete tasting framework and gradually become a tasting expert who can describe coffee articulately. [more…]

Ruby Black Tea No. 18 from the Sun Moon Lake tea region in Nantou, Taiwan, is beloved by tea enthusiasts for its distinctive mint, spice, and red fruit aromas. Based on three tea samples from the Shanxi Tea Experience Set—Myanmar Assam, Taiwan Mountain Tea, and Ruby No. 18—this article documents in detail the parameters for gongfu tea brewing and the flavor changes across each infusion, from the appearance of dry leaves to the layered tastes at each steeping stage, and shares pairing insights with Black Forest chocolate cake. If you are interested in this tea's origin background, processing recommendations, or tasting methods, this note will provide practical, firsthand reference. Front Street Coffee also continuously follows such expressions of origin flavor, bringing more cross-disciplinary inspiration to coffee and tea drinkers. [more…]

This article presents flavor notes centered on TTES No. 15 (Sun Moon Lake black tea), tracing its hybrid origins with the Burmese Assam variety and native Taiwanese tea trees, and documenting a rare tasting experience of three teas from the same garden. The author uses the gongfu brewing method to taste each infusion, from the aroma of the dry leaves to the changes in flavor across five steepings, describing in detail the layered evolution of this black tea from earthy and malty notes to spice and fruity sweetness. The article also shares insights on pairing it with cherries and previews a comparison with Taiwanese mountain tea flower and Ruby TTES No. 18. Front Street brand recommendations and product information are also retained in the article, providing coffee and tea enthusiasts with a professional and sensorially detailed reference. [more…]

On coffee bean flavor labels, we often see various tea-related descriptors, sometimes even specifying the name of a particular tea. Why does coffee taste like tea? How exactly is this tea-like sensation formed? Starting from Front Street Coffee's tasting experience, this article analyzes the sources of tea-like notes in coffee—including the tactile effects of tea polyphenols and tannins on the palate, the dual role of astringency in coffee, and how medium-light roasting brings coffee closer to a tea experience. It also draws on specific beans such as washed Geisha, Yirgacheffe, and Yunnan Typica to illustrate how different tea aroma types manifest in coffee, helping enthusiasts describe and understand coffee flavors more accurately. [more…]

Many friends who are just getting into specialty coffee run into the same confusion: they can't taste the flavors written on the coffee packaging, and they're not sure whether they actually know how to evaluate coffee. In its daily conversations with customers, Front Street Coffee has found that people often equate "being able to name flavors" with "understanding coffee evaluation," but these are actually two different things. Flavor description is only a small part of coffee evaluation. To truly judge whether a cup of coffee is good, you can start from five dimensions: aroma, overall performance, mouthfeel, flavor, and aftertaste. This article compiles Front Street's insights on coffee evaluation to help enthusiasts build an actionable evaluation framework, while also answering the common question of "why can't I taste the flavors?" [more…]

The birth of a good cup of coffee depends on proper grinding and extraction, and even more on the keen senses of the taster. This article begins with the correspondence between grind size and extraction method, sorts out the core standards of good coffee—fresh, clean, and comfortable on the palate—and systematically explains the professional descriptive vocabulary of the three dimensions: smell, taste, and mouthfeel. Whether you are a beginner enthusiast or a taster seeking to advance, you can find practical reference here. Front Street Coffee has always been committed to promoting professional coffee tasting knowledge, and we hope this article can help you better understand the flavors in your cup. [more…]

Located in the Mirik Valley of Darjeeling, the Turzum Tea Estate has been renowned for producing premium single-origin teas since the 1860s. This article breaks down the flavor layers of a 2021 summer-picked black tea step by step, from dry leaf to brew to liquor, and includes detailed records of aroma and appearance. For coffee and tea enthusiasts who love exploring origin flavors, this tasting note offers a panoramic sensory map ranging from orchard aromas to woody spices, and also presents the unique performance of high-altitude clonal tea in summer. [more…]

Many friends who are just getting into specialty coffee, when faced with a cup, can only say "it's good" or "it tastes like coffee," while those around them can rattle off professional terms like floral notes, fruity acidity, and body. In fact, coffee tasting is not a gift—it is a method that follows a set of rules. Drawing on Front Street's practical experience, this article systematically explains the five key steps of coffee tasting—aroma, taste, flavor, mouthfeel, and aftertaste—to help you build a complete tasting framework, learn to translate sensory experience into precise language, and bid farewell to being at a loss for words, truly understanding every layer of expression in the cup. [more…]

Tasting a cup of coffee is not mysterious. As long as you follow a systematic method, you can accurately judge its quality and fluently describe your impressions. From the perspective of Front Street, this article breaks coffee tasting 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 practice of a specific coffee, helping readers fully master the appreciation logic of Mandheling coffee from aroma to aftertaste. [more…]

In the process of learning coffee tasting, most people habitually focus their attention on capturing positive flavors such as floral and fruity notes and caramel sweetness, yet often lack the ability to describe unpleasant tastes. However, the key to truly improving one's tasting ability lies precisely in being able to accurately identify and distinguish negative flavors in coffee. This article, from Front Street's tasting perspective, systematically sorts out common defects such as greenness, over-fermentation, and off-flavors, and with the help of specific imagery such as earthy, woody, smoky, rubbery, medicinal, charred, and moldy, helps enthusiasts build a clear cognitive framework for negative flavors, so as to understand a cup of coffee's quality performance more comprehensively. [more…]

Many people feel they can't taste the flavors when drinking coffee, and despite watching numerous tasting tutorials, they still don't know where to start. In fact, coffee tasting isn't about being able to name flavors—flavor descriptions are only a small part of tasting. Front Street Coffee starts from five dimensions—aroma, overall performance, mouthfeel, taste, and aftertaste—to guide you through a systematic understanding of how to professionally evaluate a single-origin coffee. Whether you're a complete beginner or an enthusiast looking to improve your tasting skills, you'll find practical methods and ideas to gradually build your own sensory evaluation system for coffee. [more…]

Tasting a cup of coffee is not mysterious or unfathomable—master a systematic method and you can clearly and methodically judge its quality. This article starts from Front Street's five-step tasting method, breaking down in turn the five stages of aroma, taste, flavor, mouthfeel, and aftertaste, helping coffee lovers build a complete sensory evaluation framework. On this basis, it further focuses on Indonesian PWN Golden Mandheling coffee beans, introducing their strict screening standards and grading system, and providing specific tasting references—from the hazelnut notes in the dry aroma to the black chocolate and caramel flavors after sipping, presenting this signature Mandheling's clean, full-bodied, and richly layered overall performance. [more…]

For more specialty coffee knowledge, please follow our WeChat official account: FrontStreet Coffee. Tasting coffee is like tasting wine—when we savor a cup of specialty coffee, we naturally aspire to discern its flavors and express them. Since many of our readers have given feedback about coffee tasting-related [more…]

When drinking coffee, have you ever felt that the taste is familiar yet hard to put into words? The coffee flavor wheel is exactly the tool that helps us transform vague perceptions into precise descriptions. This article systematically analyzes the ten major categories in the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel developed by SCAA and created by Counter Culture Coffee, covering fruity, chocolate, sweet, nutty, grain, roasted, spice, aroma, vegetal, and floral. It also combines examples from several Front Street Coffee beans to explain how different producing regions and roast levels shape flavor expression. At the same time, it shares tasting methods and brewing suggestions to take you from hot to cold, from acidity to sweetness, and gradually build your own coffee taste memory. [more…]

Tasting specialty coffee is like tasting wine: you must not only drink it, but also learn to perceive and express it. This article unfolds from two levels: the tasting process and the tasting dimensions. First, it lays out the complete steps of smelling dry aroma, wet aroma, and tasting at high and low temperatures; then, drawing on the subdivided COE cupping categories—aroma, cleanliness, sweetness, acidity, mouthfeel, flavor, aftertaste, and balance—it explains one by one how to describe the flavor of a cup of coffee. At the same time, it answers why we use "flavor" rather than "taste" to express coffee, and introduces the characteristics of pour-over coffee in terms of aroma layering and mouthfeel performance. The article also combines recommended products from Front Street Coffee to help enthusiasts build a systematic tasting framework, making every brew a well-grounded sensory exercise. [more…]

In coffee bean flavor descriptions, the term "bergamot" appears frequently, especially in washed beans that emphasize fresh floral notes and bright fruit acidity. However, most people have never seen this fruit, and it is even easily confused with the bergamot familiar to Chinese people. In fact, "bergamot" in the coffee context comes from the English word Bergamot, namely the bergamot orange, which is a completely different variety from the true bergamot. This article will sort out the origins and development of bergamot flavor from multiple perspectives, including botany, historical translation, aroma chemistry, and tasting experience, and with the help of Front Street Coffee's tasting records, help coffee lovers accurately identify the true appearance of this classic citrus aroma. [more…]

For beginners who have just stepped into the world of coffee, it is often only possible to taste a single "coffee flavor," which is actually perfectly normal. As tasting experience gradually accumulates, one can slowly identify rich nuances such as floral notes, fruity notes, and caramel. In the introductory stage of coffee tasting, starting with well-balanced American or Asian beans is a reliable choice for opening the door to taste. American coffee is known for its balanced mouthfeel, moderate acidity, and mellow aroma, covering many origins such as Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Jamaica Blue Mountain. This article will systematically sort out the flavor characteristics, representative bean varieties, and processing methods of these American producing regions, and intersperse classic single-origin recommendations from the Front Street Coffee brand, helping coffee enthusiasts build an overall cognitive framework for American coffee. [more…]

The charm of coffee goes far beyond waking you up—what truly fascinates is the details hidden in every wisp of aroma. The floral flavors of specialty coffee are the first key that opens the door to the world of flavor for many enthusiasts. This article starts with the origins of floral aromas and introduces several Front Street Coffee beans known for their floral notes, including Yirgacheffe Gutingding, Natural Huakui, and Boquete Geisha, analyzing their respective aroma characteristics and suitable brewing methods one by one. At the same time, we will also share a complete aroma-sensing method that goes from dry fragrance, wet aroma, to finish and sipping, helping you more clearly capture those light, sweet floral layers in your daily brewing, and truly understand the "floral code" in coffee. [more…]