Coffee 201
How to Taste Coffee (and other silly things to say)
Much of this content is from this great video by James Hoffmann: “A Beginners Guide to Coffee Tasting”
OVERVIEW
This week, we’re starting a new series that’s all about tasting coffee. That’s a silly thing to say, and possibly an even sillier thing to dedicate a three week series to. But that’s exactly what we’re going to do, for two reasons. First, tasting coffee is really all we’re doing as coffeehouse customers and as baristas. And second, tasting coffee, contrary to popular belief, is not as simple as it’s made out to be.
What Is Tasting?
This is a ridiculous heading. Let’s roll with it, because it’s time for a diagram of a tongue. This diagram on the right is a bit of a controversial one, because you’ll occasionally hear someone say this has been “debunked”. However, tasting coffee for any length of time will confirm that there is some truth to the diagram. The reality of it is that parts of your mouth are more sensitive to certain tastes (as opposed to the debunked part, which is that those zones only taste certain flavors).
The two most useful of these are that bitter compounds tend to sit heavily on the back of the tongue, and sour flavors tend to light up the back sides of the tongue. Everything else is a lot more subjective, but those two sensations can help us identify over-extraction (often a bitter flavor) and under-extraction (often a sour flavor). We’ll be talking more about bitter and sour and the wide gulf between them in a future Coffee 201.
Extraction and Taste
When tasting coffee, the first thing we want to do is actually to focus on the physical sensations we’re experiencing. Sometimes this is referred to as “locating”. We’re looking for things like mouthfeel, linger, heaviness, etc. Let’s use espresso as an example. If the espresso is very light and almost tea-like, that’s something we should notice. If the espresso is sitting heavily on the palate (a word that is essentially an elevated term for your tongue), that’s something we should also notice.
Physicality grounds our tasting in what’s actually happening. If the espresso I’m drinking lingers on the palate for a long time, that tells me I’ve extracted too much out of it. If I get an unpleasant sourness concentrated in my cheeks and the sides of my tongue, that tells me the coffee might be under extracted, or at least is very bright and tart. You’ll hear people describe coffee as “clean”, “chewy”, “bright”, “acidic”, “cloying”, “syrupy”, etc. These all lean towards the physical sensation, and are a helpful place to start.
Focusing on the physicality of what we’re tasting frees us from the subjectivity of beginning the conversation with “tasting notes”. As a former trainer at Dapper & Wise puts it, tasting notes are a bit funny because they’re describing coffee as tasting like anything but coffee. But everybody loves a good tasting note, so it is to them that we turn.
Tasting Notes
I won’t spend too much time on tasting notes. Dapper & Wise likes to use the verbiage “this coffee reminds us of” to reinforce the fact that tasting notes are both inherently subjective and also going to be different from person to person. If you’ve never tasted a persimmon, you won’t taste persimmon in a coffee, no matter how much the roaster or your friend insists it’s there.
If you’re wanting to enhance your ability to describe coffees, my recommendation to you would be to eat and drink anything but coffee. After all, tasting notes are a matter of vocabulary, not skill. Everyone is tasting the same coffee. What makes the difference is associations, which can only come as you taste lots of different things, and description: being able to put it into words.
Watch someone (maybe yourself) who is tasting something distinctive in a coffee but is struggling to put words to it and you’ll see that tasting notes have more to do with being able to describe what you’re tasting, and not some abstract concept of a person being “better at tasting coffee.”
Practical Tips
Focus on “Locating” first
When you dial in coffee, don’t get too hung up on trying to get it to taste like the notes. Work on the core components: sour, bitter, and sweet. Those are all physical sensations. Find a balance between those three that is pleasing to you. That’s 80% of the work right there.
Taste other things and think about them
Eat an orange. Try baker’s chocolate. Eat dirt (don’t really). If you need a starting place, pick a note on a bag you’ve never heard of, buy that thing, and eat it.