by Ryan Gonzales Johnson
I haven’t blogged in a while amidst a lot of new activity here at Portland Roasting. Despite all the action, adding another roaster to the team, incoming coffees abound and World Water Day we still have to make time to taste our coffee and assess it. Although I’ve gone into the anatomy of cupping coffee and explored acidity a bit in previous posts, I’d like to maybe just discuss ways to train your palette and what to look for when you go into a place and order a coffee.
I’d like to start off by saying there are no wrong answers to what you taste in a cup of coffee. There are, however often overlooked characteristics and aspects of the experience shadowed by milk and sweeteners. I’ll stick to black coffee brewed in any drip method.
So I was looking at notes on coffees the other day from green coffee importers at Coffee Shrub and noticed a really awesome descriptor that channeled my brain perfectly: blueberry toaster waffle. In the process of cupping, a very distinct aromatic and gestational experience. I ran into a few descriptors like this over the years: fennel cake, cannabis, Fruit Loops, bergamot…
I love these lists because it shows just how open the senses are and how driven our tastes are towards memory association. It’s an addictive exercise to smell and taste a pure product like brewed coffee, beer, wine, spirits, etc… and look for those associations.
That said there are some specific ways you can look at coffee to evaluate it for what it is while allowing yourself this same way of pulling up your inventory of taste and smell to describe what’s going on in the cup.
Cupping does this very well, but in lieu of setting out 3-5 samples and going through the process, there’s some things I’ll give you to evaluate. The first being aroma. Aromatics have strong links to our memory. A trained nose can identify countless scents. Smell your coffee. I read also in an article on science daily that the aroma alone actually stimulates brain activity. The aromatics both in dry grounds and brewed coffee have unique character and you can tell a lot about what you’re in for when you take a drink.
The second is mouthfeel or body. Don’t ever forget that while coffee is 98%+ water, the solubles that go into that water from the extraction (brewing) process carry all the good stuff and quite often carry with them a literal weight to the final brew. Body is very important. Is your coffee thin like water or thick and creamy like milk when you are drinking it? Regular drip brewed coffee will look the same, but upon drinking one can really get a sense of the actual combination of health and freshness of the coffee combined with the care of the Roaster and how they executed the roasting. Body can tell you all this. And a heavy bodied coffee if often good, but can also bring some unpleasantness to the mix.
Another aspect is acidity. I went at length on this before but be aware of what you like in acidity. Bright huge citrus sparkles in the front of the pallate or mild cola-like tartness spread around the whole tasting experience or none at all. Acidity is unique and I know a good deal of people who really fiend for the wackiest acidity they can find because it’s just so exciting and immediately has you seeing coffee as the fruit that it is in a big way.
Aftertaste can’t be ignored here. Coffee will sit with you unless you’re really quick to brush your teeth. You don’t want the lingering taste to be bitter or astringent. You’ll likely prefer sweet or chocolatey or tea-like quality. I feel drinking drip coffee should leave your mouth feeling more or less clean and tasty. There’s no reason it shouldn’t.
Then there’s flavor. Flavor is up to your unique senses by and large. When cupping competitions are held, general items are used to keep a certain universialty. Not everyone has blueberry toaster waffles, or blueberries for that matter. But red fruit, stone fruit, berry like, and chocolate and honey and tobacco are things people can often associate.
The flavor association game is probably the biggest deal, and most fun thing about being coffee. It’s one of those things that many folks our industry really want to translate to every coffee drinker and hopefully get them hooked on it. Because coffee has literally thousands of chemical compounds, far outnumbering wine, it’s actually possible to find incredibly complex flavors and one can really train their taste buds to pull coffee apart in it’s many layers of taste.
There’ also a good deal of ways that I’ve found to get into training the palette. Locally, New Seasons does tastings of all sorts of things that make me turn taste nerd. Apples are amazing to compare especially looking hard at acidity and sweetness in relationship to one another. Granny Smith v. Golden Delicious… that kind of thing. Nuts are perfect too. Comparing variations of the same thing in almost any tasting instance is a wonderful primer on how to train your palette and get better at looking deeper into your coffee cup.
Cheers.
Ryan
