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,
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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.