Coffee Enthused

How to "Taste" Coffee

The quotes are doing real work there. Most of what you call the taste of your coffee isn't happening on your tongue at all.

That's good news. It means the thing you're trying to get better at is trainable, it's free, and you can practise it with the cup you were going to make anyway.

By Charles. Updated .

What your tongue does

Five things

Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, savory. That's the entire list.

What your nose does

Everything else

Berry, cocoa, jasmine, toast, citrus, tobacco. All of it arrives through smell.

When you drink coffee, aroma travels up the back of your throat to the same receptors you'd use to smell it from the cup. Your brain files the result as taste. It's mostly smell wearing a different hat.

Pinch your nose and drink. You'll get sour and bitter and not much else. Let go halfway through and the coffee arrives.

Smelling on purpose is a trainable skill

Smell is the one sense that reaches the brain directly, without routing through the thalamus first. That pathway is plastic, which means using it deliberately makes it work better.

The SCA's Peter Giuliano makes the point that this is what cupping has always been. Coffee people have run deliberate, repeated aroma exposure for about a century, and the smell training used to help people recover their sense of smell works the same way.

Why you can taste it and still can't name it

This is the most common thing a home enthusiast says about tasting, and it isn't a personal failing. Languages have plenty of words for tastes and almost none for smells.

There's no English word that means the smell of a peach the way "sour" means sour. So we describe aromas by comparison, always. Every tasting note you've ever read is a workaround for a hole in the language.

The industry's fix was to build a shared lexicon with physical reference samples to smell alongside the cup. It ran from about thirty terms in 1922 to the World Coffee Research Coffee Lexicon in 2015.

You can do a cheap version of the same thing. Next time a bag says stone fruit, open a peach or a jar of jam and smell them next to each other. The reference is what makes the word stick.

The practice

This is cupping with the ritual taken out. It costs nothing, needs no equipment, and adds about ten seconds to a morning.

  1. Smell the grounds before the water

    Right after you grind, put your nose in it. This is the strongest the aroma will ever be, and it's the easiest place to notice something.

  2. Smell the cup before you drink it

    Give it a moment to cool below scalding. Hot coffee pushes aroma up your nose, but it also flattens sweetness and blunts the differences.

  3. Name one thing, out loud or in your head

    Not a tasting note. Anything. Toast, raisin, cocoa, cut grass. Being wrong costs nothing, and the naming is the part that's doing the work.

  4. Drink it, then wait

    Notice what stays after you swallow. The finish is where sweetness and bitterness separate most clearly, and it is the easiest thing to compare between two coffees.

  5. Do it again tomorrow

    This is a trained skill, not a talent. Repetition is the whole method, and you already make coffee every morning.

Taste two at once

One coffee on its own tells you very little. Two coffees side by side tell you a lot, because your palate is far better at comparing than at describing.

Brew both the same way, at the same ratio, and drink them in turn as they cool. Pick two that should differ. A washed Ethiopian against a natural Brazilian will teach you more in one sitting than a month of drinking the same bag.

It's the same rule as fixing a bad cup. Change one thing, so you know what the difference is telling you.

Four things worth noticing

A frame for the first few weeks. Not a scoresheet.
NoticeThe question to ask
SweetnessDoes it taste like fruit or sugar, or does it just taste strong?
AcidityBright and juicy like citrus, or sharp and sour like a mistake?
BodyDoes it feel like water, like milk, or like syrup?
FinishWhat's still there ten seconds later, and do you want another sip?

One note on sweetness, because it gets second-guessed most. If a bag smells sweet to you, you're not imagining it.

Sweetness in coffee is perceived as both a taste and a smell. Caramel and vanilla aromatics can trigger it on their own, which is why a coffee can smell sweet before any of it reaches your tongue.

If it tastes bad rather than unfamiliar

Tasting and troubleshooting are different jobs. This page is for a cup that's working, when you want to understand it better.

If the cup is sour, bitter or hollow, that's a brewing problem, not a palate problem. Work through the diagnostic first. If you want to taste an origin at its best, buy it inside its window.

The points on smell, sweetness and coffee vocabulary follow the SCA's Coffee Decoded series by Peter Giuliano. The smell-training evidence there is drawn from research on smell training generally, not on coffee drinkers, so treat it as a reason to practise rather than a health claim.