How to Taste Coffee: Develop Your Sensory Skills and Get the Most Out of Every Cup

By Jessica Easto

Home coffee-making authority and author of Craft Coffee: A Manual introduces you to the wide world of coffee flavor

Have you ever purchased coffee based on delectable flavor notes—strawberry jam, milk chocolate, hazelnut—only to find none of it in your cup? It’s a common experience among coffee lovers.

These days, high-quality coffee can taste all kinds of ways, thanks to roasting techniques that help draw out the qualities of the bean. In addition to that characteristic coffee taste, you really can find hints of fruit, chocolate, and nuts in your cup—all it takes is a little knowledge, a little practice, and the ability to slow down and savor.

That’s where How to Taste Coffee comes in. With the same accessible, no-shame approach she took in Craft Coffee, bestselling author Jessica Easto explains why flavor notes are not always as straightforward with coffee as they are with other beverages, such as wine, beer, and spirits. You’ll learn how our senses perceive coffee, what creates and affects coffee flavor, and how to practice your sensory skills, using the same tools and resources as coffee professionals.

With nineteen exercises designed to help you identify and talk about what you’re tasting, you’ll come away with a more developed palate, an improved ability to choose coffee you’re going to love, and a better understanding of the astounding complexity contained within these tiny beans.

A must-read for any lover of coffee, How to Taste Coffee inspires readers to taste widely and sip consciously, with more appreciation, more discernment, and a greater sense of wonder.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agate Surrey
• Release date: Oct 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781572848795

Book preview

Cover: How To Taste Coffee: Develop Your Sensory Skills and Get the Most Out of Every Cup by Jessica Easto

HOW TO

TASTE

COFFEE

DEVELOP YOUR SENSORY

SKILLS AND GET THE MOST

OUT OF EVERY CUP

JESSICA EASTO

Logo: Agate

Copyright © 2023 by Jessica Easto

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission from the publisher.

No brands, companies, or products mentioned in this book have endorsed the information contained herein.

First printed in October 2023

P. 170, The Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel by the SCA and WCR (©2016–2020) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

P. 100, Source: World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, 2017.

Printed in China

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 123 24 25 26 27

Cover design and illustrations by Morgan Krehbiel

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Easto, Jessica, author.

Title: How to taste coffee : develop your sensory skills and get the most out of every cup / Jessica Easto.

Description: Evanston, Illinois : Surrey, an imprint of Agate Publishing, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: Home coffee-making authority introduces you to the wide world of coffee flavor-- Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023007844 (print) | LCCN 2023007845 (ebook) | ISBN 9781572843295 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781572848795 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Coffee tasting. | Coffee--Sensory evaluation. | Taste--Physiological aspects. | Smell--Physiological aspects. | Touch--Physiological aspects. | Flavor--Analysis.

Classification: LCC TP645 .E117 2023 (print) | LCC TP645 (ebook) | DDC 663/.93--dc23/eng/20230221

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007844

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023007845

Surrey Books is an imprint of Agate Publishing. Agate books are available in bulk at discount prices. For more information, visit agatepublishing.com.

CONTENTS

List of Palate Exercises

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Coffee Flavor: A Multimodal Mystery

CHAPTER 2

Coffee and the Basic Tastes

CHAPTER 3

Coffee and Flavor

CHAPTER 4

Developing a Coffee Tongue

CHAPTER 5

Practical Tips for Tasting Coffee

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Glossary

The Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel

Coffee Tasting Resource

Notes

Index

LIST OF PALATE EXERCISES

Fundamental Taste: Bitter

Fundamental Taste: Sour

Fundamental Taste: Sweet

Fundamental Taste: Salty

Fundamental Taste: Umami

Are You a Supertaster?

Basic Tastes or Retronasal Olfaction?

Astringency or Bitterness?

Heavy and Light Body

Exploring Body

Fruity

Dried Fruit (general)

Citric, Malic, and Acetic Acids

Floral

Nutty

Cocoa

Green

Raw + Roasted + Burnt

Understanding Mixture Suppression

INTRODUCTION

WHY DO WE ENJOY COFFEE? It’s a mild stimulant, sure. It’s inspired the thoughts of Great Minds over the centuries, fueled hard work and innovation, lubricated the exchange of ideas and culture, and played wingperson for countless first dates around the globe. But its unique, complex flavor is also a symphony for our senses, an opportunity to be surprised, to remember, and to savor.

Modern growing, processing, and roasting techniques—which tend to celebrate the character of the coffee bean itself, in all its raucous variety—have provided coffee lovers a world of multilayered flavor to explore and appreciate. Perhaps you, like me, took the stepping-stone path from diner coffee (first wave) to big specialty chains (second wave) to small independent purveyors (still specialty) of what I call craft coffee (third wave, fourth wave, who knows anymore) and, in doing so, discovered delightful notes of fruit, nuts, or cocoa in your cup.

Birders often talk about their spark bird, the bird that ignited their interest in bird watching. Coffee enthusiasts tend to have a similar experience, a spark brew, if you’ll allow me, that hits us over the head and shows us that coffee can taste like more than, well, coffee—something distinct and different from every other cup we’ve had before. Maybe it was a coffee so well balanced, there was no characteristic bitter bite. Maybe it was a cup that was so complex, it tasted like three different cups, all delicious, as it cooled. Or maybe a naturally processed Ethiopia walloped you with an unmistakable note of blueberry. Does this coffee have additives? No. It was a mind-blowing moment, and you now search for the sublime in every cup.

In the introduction to Coffee Sensory and Cupping Handbook, authors Mario Roberto Fernández-Alduenda and Peter Giuliano write, It is no exaggeration to say the specialty coffee industry is founded on the concept of flavor.¹ The specialty coffee industry distinguishes itself from commodity coffee by quality—and flavor is quality. Over the past several decades, the industry has worked to help producers cultivate and sell flavor, and it has developed and standardized ways to evaluate quality and train professionals to recognize and articulate it. In recent years, the industry has partnered with sensory science researchers to bring academic rigor to this growing body of knowledge, data, and protocol. The goal, as Fernández-Alduenda and Giuliano put it, is to reach valid interpretations about how a product is perceived through human senses by reducing the bias and error that come with using human beings as instruments of evaluation.² In other words, the industry is codifying the wondrous experience of drinking coffee and substantiating it with science.

The handbook, published in 2021 by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), is a product of this collaboration, as are other industry standard resources, such as the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon and Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel, both of which revolve around sensory attributes, the words we use to describe the sensation of tasting coffee. A more consumer-oriented term is flavor notes.

Ah, flavor notes. I’m sure you’ve seen them in the craft coffee shops you frequent and on the bags of coffee you buy—chocolate, walnut, strawberry. They hope to describe the indelible flavor experience we’re often chasing in our high-quality brews, and they frequently play into our purchasing decisions. That being said, I’m fairly certain that you, coffee lover, have been at times misled by flavor notes, if not disappointed, if not utterly betrayed. Perhaps you’ve given up on them completely. Perhaps, already understanding coffee’s fickleness, you dismissed them from the start.

Many of you have read the words toasted marshmallow and thought that sounded swell, only to taste none of it in your cup. Perhaps your first reaction was to blame yourself. You wouldn’t be the first person. Your palate simply isn’t refined enough, you thought, or you or the barista brewed the coffee poorly. Has a flavor note ever tarnished your experience of enjoying coffee by not delivering on its promise? Are we doomed to quest for the sublime without the benefit of reliable signposts? If all of this research has been done to codify the experience of drinking high-quality coffee, why is it so dang hard to spell it out on the packaging?

I’ve become convinced that what we’ve got here is failure to communicate.* Yes, the industry has done an immense amount of work to understand coffee sensory science and train professionals to evaluate and recognize high-quality coffee. The Coffee Sensory and Cupping Handbook’s primary goal is to help sensory scientists and professional coffee tasters communicate effectively among themselves. The Sensory Lexicon, which includes both sensory references and vocabulary, standardizes coffee’s professional trade language. However, I’m not so sure this information is trickling down to us—coffee consumers who appreciate the high quality the industry peddles—in a way that helps us purchase and appreciate coffee to the fullest extent possible. Too much of the time, all we get are flavor notes, the crumbs of sensory science, or other scraps of information that don’t quite have enough context to make sense.

I wish more of the industry would use the lexicon and flavor wheel to educate and communicate with consumers, which would strengthen our appreciation of the product, invite us to explore the diversity coffee offers, and help us make purchasing decisions. In reality, standardized consumer education and communication currently aren’t happening in any consistent, widespread way. Casually, I have observed a couple of possible reasons for this.

First, while the aforementioned tools do seem to be used widely by scientists, producers, green buyers, quality assessors, and roasters, many baristas—the faces (and thus mouthpieces) of craft coffee for most consumers—do not receive sensory training or even customer-service training, so they don’t know the standardized language. US baristas, like many in the food service industry, are often underpaid and under-supported for the services they perform already, so this is understandable in that regard.

Second, even some roasters and coffee shops that do have well-trained folks on staff simply do not use the standardized language. Some places have developed their own language, and more still take a decidedly poetic, subjective approach that does not appear—to me, someone who has studied language and written her fair share of marketing copy—to be based in consumer research or industry standard marketing strategies. In other words, it does not educate or appeal to consumers. This is not surprising. The craft coffee world is primarily a vast network of small independent coffee shops that have neither the time nor the resources to hire marketing professionals.

The result is inconsistent, subjective flavor language that, from a consumer perspective, is at best unhelpful and at worst actively confusing. If we are all using different language, and we don’t agree on what the language means, we simply cannot effectively communicate. That is the reason the SCA teamed up with scientists to create a standardized coffee language that includes vocabulary tied to references (things you taste and smell). Flavor is experiential. We can’t communicate effectively about coffee unless we have shared experience (the references) and a common tongue (the lexicon).

Flavor is experiential. We can’t communicate effectively about coffee unless we have shared experience and a common tongue.

I’m not saying that no one is effectively communicating with consumers. Some people and organizations are, and some researchers specialize in this. But we consumers simply do not yet have a widespread shared understanding when it comes to coffee flavor. We don’t understand how it works, and we don’t know how to talk about it. To my knowledge, the SCA does not offer marketing resources to help coffee shops with its consumer-facing language, nor does it offer many resources to consumers who are interested in self-educating.

That, in a nutshell, is why I wrote this book. I firmly believe that a solid foundation of knowledge stokes the fires of appreciation and enjoyment, particularly when it comes to coffee. When you understand the number of people and amount of work it takes to craft your cup, coffee becomes miraculous. When you understand the basic science of how coffee extraction works, delicious coffee starts to seem improbable, rare. And like any interest or hobby, it takes effort to learn this stuff. For those who want to take it on, I attempted to help you start your home coffee-making journey in my first book, Craft Coffee: A Manual. In addition to information about extraction and brew methods, it provides a basic overview of coffee flavor but without a ton of emphasis on it because you don’t need to know why you like it to enjoy it.

That’s still true. But lately, I’ve been thinking of coffee flavor as the final frontier—and maybe some of you would like a roadmap. Maybe you would like to know why you like or don’t like your coffee and how you can taste it with more thought and intention. Maybe you would like to understand where flavor notes come from and why they so often seem to fall short. Maybe you would like to know a little of the science behind coffee flavor. Maybe you would like to develop your palate and find joy in that journey. And maybe you would like to develop a sensory attribute vocabulary so you can talk the talk.

My mission is to make craft coffee accessible to more people by collecting everything in one place and translating barista-speak into everyday language.

As with my first book, my mission is to make craft coffee accessible to more people by collecting everything in one place and translating barista-speak into everyday language. Language is frequently the barrier between coffee consumers and professionals—even when professionals attempt to speak directly to us. If you’ve spent any amount of time around specialty coffee, you know that bags of coffee and café menus are often strewn with words, presumably to set our expectations about what the coffee is and how we will experience it. In the beginning, it feels like you need a dictionary to place an order: Ethiopia. Natural. V60. Gesha. Panama. Filter. Santafé. Colombia. Washed. Chemex.

In the most general terms, information about coffee variety, origin, and processing are signs of quality simply because they say, I am a roaster who cares about how coffee is grown and processed, and I am being transparent with you. That’s important. But at the end of the day, many of us want to experience delicious coffee, and we want to be able to discuss it with other people. Some information about flavor can be gleaned from the language of origin, processing, and so on, but it’s complicated. Nothing seems consistent, there don’t appear to be hard and fast rules, and there are so many unknowns left to explore. Where does that leave us? With many people taking their cues from those dang flavor notes. They are supposedly telling us what the coffee tastes like, after all.

This book is my attempt to bridge the language and knowledge gap between coffee professionals and coffee enthusiasts. It explains the science behind our sensory systems, provides a state of the union on coffee sensory science, and teaches you how to develop your palate with exercises that help you (1) gain sensory experiences and (2) name them using the vocabulary of the industry. In the process, it demystifies flavor notes and provides the tools you need to navigate the system, explore new coffee, and identify the coffee you like to drink. The book also spends a good bit of time marveling at the mystery that is flavor. I hope the information and insight I include here inspire you to taste widely and sip consciously, with more appreciation and a greater sense of wonder.

As part of my research for this book, I attended the Specialty Coffee Association’s Sensory Summit and took coffee sensory courses. But I should be very clear about one thing: I am neither a scientist nor a professional coffee taster, and this book will not teach you how to become a professional coffee taster. As you’ll soon find out, professional coffee tasting has very specific goals related to buying and selling green coffee, product development, quality control, and scientific research. Our goal here is very different. Our goal is to have fun. That being said, this book does rely on some tools of the industry—the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon and the Coffee Taster’s Flavor Wheel—and some of the exercises are the same as or similar to what you’d find in a professional sensory class.

This book is your introduction to the coffee sensory experience and palate development. Get ready for a weird, winding, wonderful ride.

BEFORE YOU READ

ONE OF THE REASONS I WROTE THIS BOOK is that, in general, it seems easier these days to choose craft