Today, we're gonna talk
about how to taste coffee, how to break apart those
sensations of taste, to understand what it is you
like, what you don't like, and to begin to learn to describe what it is that we're tasting. Now, this is a sort of second
part, and the first part was how to set up a simple cupping at home. If you haven't watched that video yet, go and watch that video because setting up some
sort of comparative tasting is absolutely essential to be able to develop your sense of taste and really progress quite quickly. Here, I've got two different coffees. That's enough, but having three or four or five would be even better. Now, today's video is
gonna be a lot of talking. I'm gonna have to talk through a bunch of different taste characteristics. There's gonna be a bunch
of opinion in there too. But it's not a very practical video. I'm gonna taste some coffee, but I'm mostly, I'm gonna talk to you. So the first thing I want you to do is check the description of this video. The first link is a link to a PDF, and that's a PDF that is
a kind of cupping form that I think is really helpful. Now, this form was developed by Sara Larsson at Prufrock Training, with a little help from
Evelina at Prufrock, and a tiny little bit of help from me too. There are loads of different
cupping forms in our industry, but lots of them are focused
on really specific things that aren't particularly relevant
to what we're doing here. You can look at, say, the Cup
of Excellence Cupping Form that is a complicated sheet
that's really designed to help you rank an enormous
number of raw coffees. A roaster may have a
different form that they use to assess their roasts because
they're not really looking at the raw coffee anymore. They're looking at the
success of the roast. Here, this is a guide to
help us sort of take notes and record what we like, what we don't, to be understand whether we
like a coffee in front of us or whether we dislike it, what it is that we like, what
it is that we don't like. They can help us choose
better in the future, buy coffee better in the future, communicate with others what
we like and what we don't like, and it's fun to develop
your sense of taste. So what I'm gonna do is guide you through each of the sections, each of the categories of
taste on the score sheet, and the first one is aroma, smell. How good does this coffee smell? Now, it's not really
a key part of tasting, but it is a part of why we love coffee. When you grind a coffee,
when you brew a coffee, there'll be a whole host of
aromas that are delightful. Now, one of the key things
about this sheet is the use of two individual scales, one for intensity and one for quality. You can have a coffee that
smells incredibly strong and smells fantastic that would
score high on both fronts. You can have a coffee that
doesn't smell that intense, but it does smell pleasant. Or you could have something
that smells intensely awful. You'd wanna be able to record
that on two different scales, so that's why it's like that. A lot of coffee sheets just use one scale that I find a little bit confusing. Am I supposed to rate
intensity or quality? Here, you've got two
scales. Use them both. Now, aroma isn't the most important thing, but it is a huge part of
why coffee's enjoyable. And if there are specific
aromas that you catch, it's a good place to note them down. But don't worry too much if you can't put your
finger on an exact aroma. Let's talk about acidity. Acidity is, by far, the most
complicated, controversial, difficult, problematic aspect of coffee. Coffee professionals
love acidity in coffee. And it happens for a
whole host of reasons, and often it ends up being
a little bit of a disconnect between them and a wider
audience who maybe finds the idea of sour coffee to be unpleasant. Now, acidity is just one of the best parts of the food that we eat and drink. It provides that kind of
freshness, that crispness to fruit. It gives that beautiful
contrast to rich fattiness. It's a wonderful thing, but we don't think about it
that much most of the time. Now, you'll perceive acidity around the sort of sides of your tongue. It's actually detected
all over your tongue, but you sort of feel it
along the sides there. And in coffee, it can
be a really good thing, or it can sometimes be a really
bad thing because acidity, well, in English we have two words for it. We have acidity, and we have sourness. And sourness has a kind
of negative connotation. Acidity can be bad. Not many people enjoying
drinking lemon juice. It's too sour. It's too acidic. But lemonade's fantastic. A good sort of fresh, crisp green apple is fantastic acidity. If you like sour candy, you love acidity. It's a wonderful thing. But you want it to be a positive
acidity, a fresh acidity. You want it to feel
bright and crisp and fresh and not harsh and sour. So when you're assessing acidity, the easiest way to do that is
back to comparative tasting. Does coffee A feel more
acidic than coffee B? Right, just a quantity assessment first. And then secondly, well,
which acidity do I enjoy more? Which one feels nicer? Which one leaves my tongue feeling good? Which one maybe leaves it feeling a little sort of dried out? Which one's making me salivate? These are kind of nice ways
to begin to assess acidity. One quick note, there is
quite a common phenomenon in the general population which is called bitter-sour
confusion where a lot of people, especially when tasting sour coffee, will describe it as bitter because it's unusual to most people to describe a coffee as sour. So sour bitter-confusion is pretty normal. Again, if you're perceiving it strongly down the sides of the tongue, if it's causing a little
bit of salivation, it's likely to be acidity. Now, I have come across
sour-bitter confusion quite a lot in my professional life. Typically it happens
somewhere like a restaurant where a diner will send back an espresso for being too bitter. And that shot was definitely
not over-extracted. The machine is nice and
clean. The roast is not dark. How is that a bitter shot? You kinda tear your hair out. Chances are it was just a very sour shot, and there's bitter-sour confusion at play, and that's the language
that someone will reach for to describe what they don't like. Let's talk about sweetness. Now, generally in our day-to-day lives when we talk about sweetness, we're probably referring to a simple sugar or a sweetener designed to replicate the sweetness
of a simple sugar, something like sucrose,
which is table sugar, or fructose found in fruit, that kind of very obvious,
very sweet sweetness. Now, there is no simple sugar in coffee. Coffee is not naturally sweet
in that way at any point. You can tell this because
if you take a cup of coffee and you add even the tiniest amount of just table sugar to it, you can immediately tell
that coffee is sweet in a whole other way. So here when we talk
about sweetness in coffee, it's actually a much more complicated, more complex kind of
definition of sweetness. You know what sweetness tastes like. I know what sweetness tastes like. And so for many people when they taste coffee for the first time, they're like, "Well,
that's not at all sweet." But sweetness in coffee tends to be this kind of slightly
complicated composite of a whole host of different things. Acidity can add to sweetness
in a funny sort of way. It can highlight that. It'll be about the kind
of flavors and aromas that the coffee conjures. It'll be also about the kind of texture that the coffee gives. Sweetness generally comes from ripe fruit when the coffee was grown and harvested. It comes from good
processing and good roasting and ideally good brewing as well. So there's no doubt that some coffees definitely
feel sweeter than others, but don't go looking for a
traditional obvious sweetness. It's a different kind of thing, and it is much harder to quantify. But as you go back and
forwards between coffees and you think about them,
which one feels sweeter to you? Which one feels more complex, more whole? So the next key characteristic of coffee that I want you to assess is body, right? And this is a kind of funny word. We could use texture or mouthfeel. None of them are fantastic. And it's a really key
characteristic of coffee that I feel is not really been embraced by the kind of modern
specialty coffee movement. It feels like a classic
kind of second wave thing to talk about texture, whereas we really just
wanna talk about flavor. But the texture, the mouthfeel,
the body of a coffee, how it feels in your
mouth is so important. You obviously could tell the difference between skim milk and whole milk, right? There's a huge textural difference there. One feels thin. One feels rich and full. That's the kind of thing I
want you to think about here. Is this coffee light and almost like tea, or is it kind of heavy and
full and rich and almost chewy? It's a very nice point to
compare two different coffees. Which one feels bigger, richer, fuller? Now, you can have coffees
that have a lot of mouthfeel, but you may not like that mouthfeel. At the most extreme end, robusta is a species
that if you taste that, that will have a ton of body and texture, but it's not a particularly
enjoyable one, to me anyway. Some people certainly
like it more than I do, and that's okay. But it's certainly one to consider. Now, when it comes to
assessing the sort of texture or the mouthfeel of a coffee, it's where I actually really prefer to use cupping as a brew method. If you, say, use a paper filter, that tends to sort of homogenize mouthfeel in quite a frustrating way. It's much harder to sort of discern between small differences in mouthfeel with paper-filtered coffee. With a cupping where
there's no filtration, light, delicate coffees still
feel very light and delicate. Heavier, richer, fuller coffees
definitely feel that way too so that's why I'm a big
fan of the cupping method to help develop language
around coffee tasting. So the last category to talk about in this section is finish, and that's really what are you left with after swallowing that coffee, right? Does that feel good? Does that feel bad? Is it a harsh, unpleasant finish? Do a whole bunch of pleasant
flavors slowly develop and sort of build over time? What are you left with? Is it a nice taste or a bad taste? Do you like the aftertaste or not, right? Some coffees will almost disappear, right? You'll swallow, and you'll be left with really kind of nothing there. That would be scoring low on both quantity and, for me, on quality as well. There might a brief finish, where it's lovely for a
second but then goes away. It's quite a tricky thing to do if you're tasting multiple coffees. It needs a little bit of patience because you constantly wanna go back and compare and contrast. So take your time here. You can taste coffees all the way down until they're pretty
much room temperature, so there's no rush here. You've got at least 30 minutes to do so. But don't keep bouncing
backwards and forwards when you wanna score this. Taste it, let it sit 30 seconds, a minute, and really decide how you feel. There's one more category
left that I wanna talk about, which is flavor, but before that, I just need to tell you
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courses that they offer. Imagine what new skills you could acquire in the next 60 days. Now, flavor is undeniably the category that gets people the most excited because being able to
accurately describe the flavors of coffee makes you feel like a pro. The description of flavor
amongst professionals can easily get frustratingly competitive. People are trying to call out the most specific descriptor they can, and I don't think that's
particularly helpful. I would say that there's a few
key kind of groups of flavors that are worth paying attention to that will help you
understand what you like and what you don't like. Now, there are flavor wheels out there to help you narrow down your descriptors to something quite precise,
but I don't want you to feel like you have to use a precise descriptor for it to be accurate. I get quite frustrated by
our industry's obsession with very specific descriptors that are reliant on
whoever's tasting that coffee having the same water brewing the same way from the same batch that they tasted. Coffee is a moving target, and I think very specific descriptors are probably intimidating to some people, frustrating to others,
pretentious to others still. So let's just talk about
some broad characteristics. So let's talk about kind
of the fruity category of flavor descriptors that people use. Now, this is just a personal theory thing, but I would say there
are, broadly speaking, three categories of kind
of fruit descriptors that you'll see in coffee. At one end, you might see those kind of fresh fruit descriptors
that cover things like berries, things like stone fruits,
things like apples or pears, and then in the middle you might have what I might call the kind of
cooked fruit characteristics, things that are jammy, things
that are like kind of baked, kind of pies, all that kind of stuff. You'll see people refer to sort
of cooked fruits sometimes. And then on the other end, there
are those kind of tropical, through to kind of fermented fruit flavors that are really quite
different to all of the others that we've talked about beforehand. For me, these are kind of tied to acidity. If you have a sort of medium to high level of acidity in a coffee, you're probably gonna
wanna start hunting round for a fresh fruit descriptor. That's the time in the real world where we get high sweetness, high acidity, is in fresh fruits, and that's what your
brain is probably thinking about something in that category. Is it berry-like? Is it grape-like? Is it kind of appley and
fresh and crisp that way? Or is it maybe more like a
plum or a peach or something, that kind of sweet/acidic combo there? If the coffee has a
little bit lower acidity, them, yeah, I would
generally look for more of a kind of cooked fruit descriptor. I think those are really
helpful sometimes. Generally when you cook fruits down, you do diminish their acidity, which is why if you're
getting that kind of aroma and flavor of fruit, but
you wanna describe it well, I think cooked fruits
are a good place to go. On the other end, you've
then got categories like kind of tropical fruits or sort of slightly fermented
wild kind of things there. It can cover things like strawberries, even though that really
should sit right in this end, but that kind of aroma of
strawberries is often common in things like naturally
processed coffees. Or you might have coffees that have had a much longer fermentation that's kind of skirted things
getting a little too wild, and you might use descriptors
like mango or pineapple for those kind of coffees. Generally speaking,
this category of flavor is a little bit of a love-hate thing with both consumers and professionals. Some people really love
naturally processed coffees that have these kind of characteristics. Some people really,
really, really hate them. Now, there is one category of flavor that if I was being fancy I would call the kind of Maillard and caramelization family of flavors. If I'm being less fancy, I would say it's the
things that have gone brown and are now delicious category. This would include things
like kind of caramels or chocolate or toast or biscuits or things that have got baked,
things that have been roasted in a delicious and kind of sweet way. Coffee undergoes a whole host
of very similar reactions to other things that are roasted or baked, and so using those kind of words, I think, are very good descriptions of coffee. Typically, you might wanna be trying to describe the particular
kind of sweetness that a coffee has, right? Is it more like a kind of maple syrup? Is it more like a caramel? Is it more like a toffee? Do people know the difference between toffee and caramel anyway? Who knows? I don't want you to be really
specific in this stuff. It isn't helpful because
you'll end up chasing a thing. If one specific word pops
into the back of your brain, write it down, keep it, grab it. It's really useful when that happens. But don't feel you have
to get that specific for every single thing. Now, it's perfectly acceptable
to write down descriptors for things that you
don't like here as well. If there is a bitterness
if you don't like, if there is a burntness
that you don't like, if there's a kind of rubbery
flavor that you don't like, if it tastes like earth or
wood or mushrooms or vinegar or just something unpleasant, it's okay to pay attention to
the things that you don't like as much as the things that you do like. Now, on this little score sheet, there is at the end a place for a score. Now, I'm not a huge fan
of scores in general, but it is a nice place to kinda summarize how you feel about a
particular coffee, right? Just give it an emotional
score. I think that's okay. In coffee, we score in a
much more structured way where there's lots of different
categories contribute scores to a final score. Those are useful for some people. They're a little problematic for others. Here, I just want you to have somewhere to make a note of your favorites, for the things you didn't really care for, and for the things in between. So I did just wanna touch
on one final characteristic that isn't really discussed
in typical coffee tastings or coffee scoring sheets. That's bitterness. Now, as an industry, we're
not very comfortable talking about bitterness because to
us, bitterness is failure. We think that one of the
key sort of selling points of a specialty coffee is that it is much, much, much less bitter than commodity coffee,
than commercial coffee. But there's still some
bitterness there, right? There are undeniably bitter compounds in every single cup of coffee, and it's okay if you
wanna talk about that. It's okay if you like that. For us, bitterness is kind of a failure. It's a failure of roasting.
It's a failure of brewing. We don't really wanna talk
about, even if you like it. And I'll be honest, it's true for me. If I'm doing a public tasting, I really won't talk about bitterness until someone raises the question. But it's okay if you like it. It's okay if you wanna
take notes about it. I just wanted to explain why as an industry we don't
really talk about it. So go. Go and taste. Go and compare and contrast.
Take a bunch of notes. Don't settle on anything
until you've had a chance to taste it right the
way down until it's cool. You're gonna change your mind about how you feel several times in the course of one tasting. That's totally normal. Now, I don't say this very much, but do please make sure you're subscribed because there is something
very fun, very silly, very big, very cool coming very soon, and I don't want you to miss out. So if you can, please subscribe. I'll just say thank you
so much for watching, and I hope you have a great day.
